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(Many of the terms which appear here may be familiar from linguistic
philosophy and structuralist theory. However, because of the need to
develop a specialised terminology for Borges’ideas many terms which
appear in this glossary may be unfamiliar. Also Borges’ own use of
these terms often requires some clarification. Where an analogue can
be found in the work of well-known structuralist and narratological
theorists I have attempted a comparison. Where this is not possible I
have done my best to provide helpful explanations.)
grammatical time - the use of the word ‘time’ as a marker for any
period of duration which may be substituted for it without destroying
the grammatical sense of the sentence in which it occurs. Thus, in the
sentence: ‘I haven’t seen you for a long time’ a long time may be
exchanged for any other phrase that also expresses a sufficiently long
period, like three years, or five months, depending on the emotional
attitude of the addressor. While interesting in itself, this classification
is meant to give a rule by which we may discount grammatical word-
use when considering particular words in poetical utterance. See 1.2.2
Time as a Word & 1.2.3 The Grammatical Use of Time
Abstract
Glossary
Contents
Table of Diagrams and Figures
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER ONE
Time in Fervor de Buenos Aires: Metaphysical Explorations .................. 19
1.1 Childhood Memories and Ontological Problems...................................... 20
1.2 A Theory of Syntactic Substitution for Grammatical,
Objective, and Super-Objective Time in Fervor de Buenos Aires............ 31
1.3 Time and Four Themes ............................................................................... 38
1.4 Formal Motivation........................................................................................ 51
Endnotes ............................................................................................................ 58
CHAPTER TWO
Space in Fervor de Buenos Aires, Luna de enfrente and
Cuaderno de San Martín: Metaphysical Reconciliations ......................... 70
2.1 Geometry of Subjectivity ............................................................................ 72
2.2 Geometrical, Temporal and Deistic Elements of the Labyrinth............... 89
2.3 The Ontological and Historical Fallacies................................................... 97
2.4 Mythopoesis .............................................................................................. 107
Endnotes ..................................................................................................... 111
CHAPTER THREE
Metaphor and Language: A Regimen of Signification............................. 119
3.1 A Functionalist Theory of Verbal Relations............................................ 120
3.2 Modal Description and Formal Postponement....................................... 136
3.3 Pragmatics of the Text ............................................................................. 153
3.4 Pragmatics of the Fantastic ..................................................................... 160
Endnotes ..................................................................................................... 164
CHAPTER FOUR
Text and World: Symbolic Reproduction in Life and Art ...............page 175
4.1 Magic causality ..................................................................................... 176
4.2 The Production of Symbol ................................................................... 191
4.3 Magic causality as a Theory of Verbal Idealism................................. 214
4.4 The Film Image as Iconographic Complex ......................................... 220
4.5 Post poetics .......................................................................................... 231
Endnotes ..................................................................................................... 237
CHAPTER FIVE
World as Text: Grammar of the Eternal Labyrinth .................................. 249
5.1 Agents of destiny
Universal History as syntactical archetype… … … … … … … … … … … … … ..249
5.2 The Foundations of Analogy: Reading out of Derrida............................ 252
5.3 The Strange Case of M. F. de Saussure................................................... 256
5.4 The Even Stranger Case of M. Condillac ................................................. 260
5.5 Borges (after deferral)?
a Saussurean model of Metaphor… … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … ..268
5.6 The différance difference .......................................................................... 272
5.7 Borges and Authorial Intent:
Two Modes of Recapitulatory Consciousness… … … … … … … … … … … ..279
Endnotes ..................................................................................................... 291
Table of Diagrams
Figures
Figure 1: Ultraism’s Four Criteria for Metaphor....................................... 204
Acknowledgments
I'm aware I have used the word ‘magic’ while only giving a cursory
explanation of its place in Borges’ thought. This is partly because it
circulates through its space so pervasively it is difficult to say exactly
what Borges means by it, and partly because its position is one of
fundamental, and therefore submerged, importance to the whole
Borgesian enterprise. But one should be aware that magic causality is
a continuously active causal principle of narrative, and as such must
be rigorously demarcated from “magical realism,” which is, in the
introduction of some fantastic element whose contradictions must be
accounted for, more a fundamental thematic presupposition that can
be historically and culturally located, than a narrative mechanism to
be universally applied.11 For this reason I have not introduced magic
causality at the outset of the dissertation because its intricacies can
only be appreciated after a good deal of archaeologising has been
done to establish a set of theoretical principles that allows it to
emerge. Borges himself came to the narrative form only after
substantial theoretical work on poetics, linguistic analysis, and theory
of metaphor. There have been studies that have used the term, or
variants of it, rather carelessly, seeing it as an indeterminate narrative
principle that can be easily grouped with the French Symbolists, the
Anglo-American New Critics, Structuralists, Receptionists, even Post
Modernists, none of whom, however, can claim an iron-clad
colonisation, but most of whom can point to obvious coincidental
similarities. I offer my Borges (and this Borges is none but my own, et
ad crucem captionibus) as the bearer of a non-psychological, verbally
causal theory of narrative reception, no doubt flawed and
fragmentary, but one which nevertheless offers insights enough to
warrant its further investigation.
17
But Borges was obviously interested in more than time and space.
Chapter Three selects his comments on language in the early essays
for critical investigation. I claim that having established a rudimentary
working-out of his own poetic subject position in the early verse
collections, he used the essays to explore and consolidate a
linguistically-inspired foundation for a general theory of readerly
reception. Although it is possible to see such an eclectic author as
Borges in a variety of ways, on the basis of internal evidence I have
interpreted him as mainly a linguistic functionalist (it being his
comments to this effect that spurred my own efforts), feeling that this
gives a coherent reading in the light of his later narrative theory.
Borges begins his theoretical work on language by investigating the
comfortable assertion of the Ultraists that metaphor is the key to
symbolic effect in verse. I believe that he diverged from this point of
view after an initial period of attraction, incorporating his insights from
19
CHAPTER ONE
20
1.1 Childhood Memories and Ontological Problems
One finds a possible reason for Borges having written the Funes story
in another key childhood recollection, one Borges would reiterate in
conversations and interviews during his career, and which illustrates
the disquieting thought that memory, as ‘decaying Sense,’in Thomas
Hobbes’ phrase, may be logically impossible as the authentic
reproduction of experience:
BARNSTONE: Well, if you try to think why you think, you can’t think
that. Yet sometimes I walk down the street and say, not who is this
walking down the street, but who is this thinking he’s walking down
the street, and then I’m really puzzled.
BORGES: Yes, and then you go on thinking who is this thinking he’s
thinking he’s thinking, no? I don’t think that stands for anything. That’s
merely grammatical, they're only words.41
It’s not extraordinary to suggest that we can divide memory into two
classes of events, the first being that of one’s sensual recollection,
and the other being that of grammatical effects, as Borges suggests.
We can employ the division to construct a possible account of
differing grammatical and propositional complexes in Fervor de
Buenos Aires. While propositional complexes describe a belief
system, grammatical complexes depend solely on their semantic
structuration to express meaning. The sentence: ‘Beth gets under
Tom’s skin’ may describe a physical unlikelihood, but its sense is
unequivocal taken at the semantic level; Beth literally transplants
herself under the epidermis of the unfortunate Tom. The propositional
complex that the sentence describes presupposes a situation in which
epidermal transfer is common. This would be a place where skins are
regularly displaced, with everything that such gruesome behaviour
entails: naked corpses, changed identities, an Epidermal Police.
Propositional eventualities derive their force from being in opposition
to a commonplace reality. It’s only in the so-called, real world that a
belief system can assert itself as unique.42 But we should conversely
note that this division into grammatical and propositional sense
doesn’t include figurative use. Figurative use is a rational
accommodation between grammar and belief: we know that Beth
can’t really get under Tom’s skin, even though we understand the
semantic sense of the statement, nor do we commit ourselves by
accepting the statement as a rational series of sounds, to living in a
world of rampant dermoklepts. The trouble with figurative use is that,
30
BORGES: You might go into a second category. You may feel a very
strong physical pain. For example, you may get it through electricity or
through a toothache. Then when you feel that pain, you won’t feel the
pain. Then after that you say, well, this is a toothache, and then you
know that you felt the pain. Then after that you might for a third time
and say, well, I knew that I knew. But after that I don’t think you can
go on.44
Diagram 1
Grammatical Memory
"Memory" is
memory memory constantly
memory toothache refreshed by
re-reference
to an equally
illusory
"source".
I remember that I remember that I remember my toothache.
Sensual Memory
I am sorry to say...that I have written fifty or sixty books, and yet I find
all those books are contained in the first book I ever published, in that
dim book, written ever so long ago, Fervor de Buenos Aires ,
published way back in 1923. That book is a book of poems, and yet I
find that most of my stories are there, except that they're there lurking,
they are to be found there in a secret way and only I can ferret them
out. And yet I keep on rereading that book and reshaping what I have
written in that book. 45
On the Slab
In understanding Borges’philosophical maturation, we might insist on
a straight-out biographical reading, situating Fervor de Buenos Aires
in relation to its critical reception. Such a reading, however, directed
outside Borges’ private world to that of an Argentine literary clique
that received him only grudgingly, would be unsuitable. It would only
give a fragmented view of an already fragmentary subject at best.
Better, I argue, or at least more satisfying, to get inside the skin of the
poems, anatomise their vital organs and watch them pulsate on the
autopsy bench. To take this line of approach it's necessary to see the
individual pieces making up Fervor de Buenos Aires as both parts of a
whole, and individuals in their own right. 51 For this purpose the words
“time” and “space” have been selected as the most vital organs in
Borges’poetic corpus. 52
Borges the poet uses the word time in two major modalities. Ignoring
its idiomatic use as a grammatical duration marker, he uses it, firstly,
as an ordinary noun denoting the succession of events, and,
secondly, as a quasi-personal invocation to a more generalised
historical entity. It is this rhetorical strategy that I will now investigate,
adopting Husserl’s approach to time consciousness solely as a point
of departure for the division between an Objective time, as our
36
Diagram 2
Diagram 3
Diagram 4
Super-Objective, or
vocative, Time The word "time" is used in
the vocative case, but is
used as an addressive act
locating the poet as the
reflexive object. Thus,
'Rosas' Time
even though it occurs both
as the subject of the
sentence and as its
quasi-object, the poet's
New Subject subject position is
projected beyond the
Position poem's frame of reference
to assume another level of
objectivity, as
Super-Objectivity.
Time for Borges is, thus, the focus of multiple modalities. Besides
using it grammatically, where it functions as a place-holder, he also
employs it quasi-personally as a verbal act, positioning the subject in
relation to time. He also uses it self-reflexively to project his persona
as an extra-poetic addressee. The following diagram illustrates these
distinctions:
39
Diagram 5
Can be replaced
PLACE-HOLDER Grammatical by any time-term:
use is
non-functional
I believe we are now able to distinguish one use from the other, in any
example Borges may present us with. 61 We can see that Borges’
subject position changes radically when he talks about time. These
distinctions are useful for determining a hidden economy of
propositional value in the early poetry. Borges may talk about time,
but it's only by being able to distinguish when this talk indicates
statements of belief, rather than being merely grammatical or poetic,
that we can read the propositional attitudes determining persistent
concerns for the writer throughout his life. 62 Diagram 6 shows Borges’
poetry as the combination of three levels of semantic value.
Diagram 6
Super-Objective Ontology
Quasi-Personal Rhetoric
Grammatical Syntax
Now let us explore the links between these themes, and the formal
determinations so far made in our discussion of time. I will now give
an account of how the interplay of formal determinations and
ontological themes structure Borges’works.
Time, as well as God, exists not only an ontological marker, but also
as a field of force in Borges. He shifts his focus from the celestial to
the terrestrial constantly. Not only the sleeping suburbs, and their
analogue in the Recoleta cemetery, but even something as mundane
as a card game can be used to signify mystic consequence. In ‘El
Truco’time, as an expression of will, departs, becoming replaced by
colloquial time as the sensation of memory. In a description of friends
playing the card game truco or trick, the card table becomes an
enchanted domain where,
into the past. Borges occupies the mid-point between protension and
retension to centre time quasi-personally. He isolates Super-Objective
time, to which we can make no appeal for clemency or understanding,
from the poet’s intimist perspective. Yet, the human is linked to the
divine. He needs a machina e deo to connect these two spheres of
life, and finds it in truco’s mathematicality. Truco is existentially
contingent, a theme Borges would use throughout his fictions. Once
the pack is shuffled the cards are dealt in a vast, although
mathematically limited, series. 76 No matter how chaotic the order
seems to be, each game will have only so many moves and
outcomes. Yet, the billions of possible combinations must logically
recur at some time. Thus, in an analogue to the eternally recombining
atoms of Epicurus and Lucretius that fashion all possible universes,
an idea that his father introduced him to as a child, Borges describes
truco as a symbol of innumerable life contingencies, forming and
dissolving
While one can agree with Stabb that we shouldn't discount the strong
influence of biographical circumstances in shaping Borges’ work, it
might be added that one needs be extremely careful in assigning
them a directly causal effect. In Borges biography is seldom
straightforward. While it's tempting to see in the card-players, seated
around their table immersed in a partially self-created world, the
recapture of youthful first friendships (Borges tells us that in order to
get to know two of his closest boyhood friends in Geneva he taught
them how to play truco) 82 the remanso motif functions too
heterogeneously for simple interpretation. The manipulation of time by
Borges is not a simple matter of slowing it down, or manipulating as
though it were a physical device. The physical is one aspect of
temporal manipulation in Borges, but his changing subject position
also determines the contours and location of poetic temporality.
Borges can, as it were, be said to slow time down in the ritual of the
truco-players, but this leaves the question open of how he logically
accomplishes it. At this stage it only provides a tenuous link to the
later narratives of temporal manipulation, as in ‘The Secret Miracle’
and ‘The God’s Script’. Beyond the romantic conventionalities of this
first poetry, Borges has a series of ideas about time and human
perception disallowing monologic interpretation. While time is
“dammed-up,” it's also detained, the chief metaphor of temporal
restraint in ‘El Truco.’ The metaphor also occurs in ‘La Recoleta,’
‘Amanecer’ and ‘Sala Vacía’. However, whether it's dammed or
detained, Borges’ attitude to it is still one of syntactic differentiation. 83
In other words, it is the grammatical, rather than the poetical, use of
the word time that determines its metaphoric use. The word time is
something Borges manipulates as a symbolic phenomenon within
determined linguistic bounds. Its function within the work is
47
Nowhere does this tension better appear than in what I call a little act
of personal accommodation titled ‘Sala Vacía’ (‘Empty Parlour’)
where, although time is recognised as personally untrappable, the
emotionality of the effort is transferred to the concrete apparatus of
49
and
Los daguerrotipos
mienten su falsa cercanía
90
de tiempo detenido en un espejo.
However, even if the life of the flesh with its «trémula esperanza, el
milagro implacable del dolor y el asombro del goce» 100 can't withstand
sensual oblivion, the ‘logical’soul of the philosopher, less personality
than idea, consoles a time that is becoming less the plaything of card-
52
En la sala tranquila
cuyo reloj austero derrama
un tiempo ya sin aventuras ni asombro
sobre la decente blancura
que amortaja la pasión roja de la caoba,
alguen, como reproche cariñoso,
pronunció el nombre familiar y temido. 103
Time here is not only beyond the control of individuals, but even
beyond the control of the gods ending their line stretching in a parallel
temporality throughout time’s ‘indefatigable immortality’
Even if Borges was to later restate this thought, the apparent paucity
of its new vocabulary gives it a greater power for being more
indeterminate:
I think that there are but few metaphors. We have, for example, time
and the river, living and dreaming, sleeping and dying, the eye and
the stars. These should be sufficient. 129
CHAPTER TWO
Borges claims not to have really noticed his condition until it made its
presence felt in 1955 when he was director of the National Library and
the spines of the books around him swirled into grey anonymity.
However, certain features of his childhood make one suspect this
moment of visual degeneration accomplished an event he'd been
preparing for most of his life. We know the reason the family left for
Switzerland in 1914 was so his father Guillermo could seek a
consultation with a Genevan eye-specialist to ameliorate the
hereditary condition eventually claiming the sight of both his paternal
grandmother and his great-grandfather whom both died, Borges
informs us, ‘blind and smiling’. 141 What might it have been like for
Borges the child of eight or nine, whose father had begun introducing
abstruse philosophical problems to him centering on the fallibility of
identity and matter, to have inherited the legend of the family
blindness? The mahogany furniture sitting at the centre of his deathly
still interiors in Fervor de Buenos Aires affected the boy deeply,
becoming associated with a now famous Borgesian motif, the mirror
as an image of duplication:
I always stood in fear of mirrors. When I was a little boy, there was
something awful at my house. In my room we had three full-length
mirrors. Then also the furniture was mahogany, and that made a kind
of dark mirror, like the mirror to be found in Saint Paul’s epistle. I
stood in fear of them, but being a child I did not dare say anything. So
every night I was confronted by three or four images of myself. 142
65
Diagram 7
E E
s'
Character's Action v
Opening of v Closing of
narrative v narrative
v Character's Action
s
When things are said to begin or end their existence, we do not mean
this with regard to God, but His creatures. All objects are eternally
known by God, or, which is the same thing, have an eternal existence
in His mind; but when things, before imperceptible to creatures, are,
by a decree of God, made perceptible to them, then they're said to
begin a relative existence with respect to created minds. 175
an explanation for the existence of evil. The argument runs along the
following lines: since there is Evil in the world, but God is Good, God
can't have created the world. Therefore something immensely
powerful, but intrinsically flawed, might be responsible, and this is the
demiurge or artisan. (We need not concern ourselves here with the
obvious objection an omnipotent God could have also produced a
completely good demiurge.) 176
However, how can Borges make this link between two philosophers
so fundamentally opposed in their conclusions as to the ends of
human life? The only way Borges can effectively hope to combine
Schopenhauer, who preached oblivion as the only means of subduing
the will, and Berkeley, who posited acceptance of the world’s divine
nature as of supreme importance for Humanity’s well-being, is in the
person of a demiurge, aware of its own imperfection, locked in an
agony of indecision between perpetuating or vexatiously destroying
the world. This demiurge, however, does not appear in the writing of
either thinker, therefore its discovery as an invention serving to link
the world with its divinely nodding contemplator, remains a Borgesian
compromise. Borges operates the shaky mechanism of his clock-work
universe as a philosophical compromise. In the end, the problem must
74
be resolved with some respect for reality - after all, the world does not
simply blink out of existence with the batting of God’s eyelashes. A
few conscious minds must be involved in perpetuating existence -
even if they don’t actually know they're doing it. Will a few night owls
be enough to keep the city in existence? In the end they are, and
Borges, who has been walking the streets, finds his house at
daybreak, secure in the knowledge that
En esta página de dudosa valor asoma por primera vez una idea que
me ha inquietado siempre. Su declaración más cabal está en
“Sentirse en muerte” (El idioma de los argentinos, 1928) y en la
“Nueva refutación del tiempo” (Otras inquisiciones, 1952). Su error,
ya denunciada por Parménides y Zenon de Elea, es postular que el
tiempo está hecho de instantes individuales, que es dable separar
unos de otros así como el espacio de puntos. 182
The moment is climactic, since it's only after this revelation Borges
can posit a capricious demiurge against which his fellow insomniacs
might struggle to save the world. However, the heroism is underlined
by a substratum of geometrical effects structuring the experience and
linking it formally to other pieces dealing less explicitly with the
problem of philosophical perception and geometry. The strongest of
these is the metaphor of the net suggested by the lines above: the
light, like a creeper («enredadera») is set to implicate the walls with
shadow. 184 Enredadera is formed around the core of ‘red’ meaning
net, and derives from the Latin ‘rete’ from which the gladiatorial
‘retiarius’ or ‘net-caster’ took his title. Borges, however, far from
76
The poet is on the point of entering this sacrosanct space when the
awful suspicion comes to him. Just as after entertaining the dreadful
thought Buenos Aires might be nothing more than the persisting idea
of a few insomniacs, he is shocked by the misgiving that this space
78
too might hold some power over existence, and looks beyond it to the
bustling Port of Buenos Aires filled with the intractable chaos of life:
Abajo
el puerto anhela latitudes lejanas
y la honda plaza igualadora de almas
se abre como la muerte, como el sueño. 188
The complex metaphor of the net has been imbued with a sinister
atmosphere of anticipation, reminiscent of Borges’ growing
awareness of the capricious will of a renegade god about to destroy
his creation. However, would Borges alone be enough to stave off
disaster? Obviously not at this stage, the poet feeling very much
under the influence of impersonal philosophical ideas: in a world
where time and space are merely the forms human life takes on, one
man’s efforts to protect the world would obviously count for nothing.
As a symbolic foil to the ambitions of a wayward god Borges
introduces a sparse religious imagery where environmental effects
take on a talismanic power. This power is ambivalent, as befits the
character of a universe stretched between the ontological options of
impersonality and transcendence and orthodox religiosity. It may be
the case that in ‘Campos Atardecidos’ the hot, dry westerlies
sweeping in from the pampas on summer afternoons have ‘tyrannised
the street like an Archangel’(«El poniente de pie como un Arcángel
tiranizó el camino») and the night in ‘Caminata’is compared to the «el
plumaje oscuro de un Ángel» but the imagery shows no sign of further
exploration in terms of religious belief. Explicit orthodox religious
imagery was not of great concern to Borges at this stage of his poetic
development, and it was certainly not of great importance to the
Ultraísta movement, which took its cues from the technological icons
of the twentieth century. Although the Spanish word ‘cielo,’which can
mean either sky or Paradise, is used ten times in Fervor de Buenos
Aires it only occurs once in its sacred guise. So too ‘God’only makes
nine appearances. When compared with the frequency of a key urban
image, that of the ‘calle,’ the contrast is startling: both God and
heaven are outnumbered over two to one by the city street, making it
by far the most powerful image in Borges’earliest poetry.
Having made this point let us now find a genetic source for the use of
geometrical allusion in Fervor de Buenos Aires. One is drawn back to
the use made by Borges’ father of a chessboard in illustrating the
paradoxes of Zeno to his son. Games certainly instilled a predilection
for geometric allusion in him. In ‘Plaza de San Martín’ the sunlight
playing through the jacarandas and acacias creates a ‘network’
recalling the ‘equidistant’ points of intersection on a chessboard’s
squares, a figure also working forcefully in the image of the ‘spread-
out streets’of ‘Las calles’.
Can one really see Borges as the poetic and terrestrial version of
Berkeley’s God? The image of Borges as the solitary spectator
keeping the poetic ‘Benarés’ alive occurs again in ‘Caminata’ where
the solitary poet, wandering the back streets of Buenos Aires at
midnight, expresses the poetic imagination in terms of ontological
maintenance: «Yo soy el único espectador de esta calle; si dejara de
87
verla se moriría». 206 Yet, this is not the God of the philosophers alone,
since Borges introduces a biblical element in the shape of a night sky
descending like «...el plumaje oscuro de un Ángel cuyas alas tapan el
día». Borges revisits religious motifs in ‘Calle desconocida’where the
wandering poet identifies with the crucified Christ, reflecting that his
footsteps reproduce those on Golgotha («...todo inmediato paso
nuestro camina sobre Gólgotas»). 207
Arrojado a quietud,
divisaré esa playa última de tu ser
y te veré por vez primera, quizá,
como Dios ha de verte,
desbaratada la ficción del Tiempo,
sin el amor, sin mí. 212
childhood friend, he could only endure her for three years. They
divorced in 1970. 220
The poet’s place is fixed as the receiver of divine gifts rather than their
bestower, a theme he'd reiterate in the ‘gift’ poems. 224 The poet who
could keep a city alive by perceiving it in the idealist fantasy of
‘Caminata’ is reduced to the established role of the grateful artist
whose works arise not from within himself, but as the result of divine
inspiration. This is another effect of the ontological fallacy. While the
love-object is idealised and de-sexualised, the role of the poet
becomes minimised into what might fulfil the task of adoration. The
cosmos of the inspired artist obeys a strictly feudal economy. One’s
greatness derives from a greater power, and is therefore a gift. The
price for such a gift is the imagined transferral of one’s artistic
sensibility to that of an extramundane personality. Here the artist
shines only by reflected light, and this light emanates from the God
granting him a portion of his own greatness. Inspiration is thus a
relationship of continual reciprocity: God grants artistic excellence on
the instalment plan. However, one day the debt might be paid in full;
these pennies from Heaven have a way of mounting up. Art is
therefore a deferred payment, which makes it directly available to the
symbolism of accumulating debt. Because the ontological economy is
so unequal (God’s resources are infinite) the only logical recourse of
the poet is to an inverted historicity. Because the poet can never hope
to pay off the fabulous sums expended in this cosmic stipend,
individual personality becomes subsumed by historical awareness.
The debt is paid, so long as the Almighty Book-Keeper allows the
perpetuation of an individual personality throughout history. The
occupation of this personality will be, of course, to glorify God through
art. The artist therefore obtains a never-ending contract with God for
His inspiration, and God is remunerated by a series of works of art
throughout history.
Yet, he can’t slough off the immortal task since it has been granted by
an Almighty, and potentially All-Punishing, God. The presence of an
all-powerful deity acts as a force of regulation constraining Borges’
poetic mission to sing the praises of the city, as well as the potential
for hubris associated with poetic creation. To fend off the possibility of
over-weening pride he offers an expiation of his gifts to placate a
jealous creator. In poetry humility is always a safe bet:
Borges’ equivocal use of the word time allows him to make subtle
shifts between the subject position always within time, and a quasi-
objective standpoint. That's why in ‘Amorosa anticipación’‘the fiction
of Time’can't spoil the object of Borges’ affections, yet in ‘Jactancia
de quietud’(The Boast of Quietude) while he is sitting quietly at home
contemplating life, he can reflect that «el tiempo está vivíendome» as
though he was seeing it through the eyes of an extra-temporal third
party. 233 On the other hand, this time is not the inevitable time of ‘A
Farewell’ which «se desbordada sobre el abrazo inútil», a time he
shares with his lover and one that frustrates his passion. 234 The poet
again slips out of subjectivised time and into its historical counterpart
in ‘Montevideo’where he describes the Uruguyan capital as a pristine
version of a Buenos Aires becoming modernised. However, even here
Borges is unable to fully divest himself of time as subjective
experience, acknowledging that for all its nostalgic appeal,
Montevideo is a «puerta falsa en el tiempo» rather than a way of
obtaining genuine historical experience. 235
2.4 Mythopoesis
Reconciliations
Borges’ realisation that an effective synthesis can be made of ‘lyric’
and ‘intellectual’ narrative finds its first expression in a short, and
highly peripatetic, ‘biography’ of a local lunfardo poet published in
1930. Facilitated by the winnings from the Second Municipal Prize for
Literature on his third book of essays, El idioma de los argentinos
(1928), he settled down to compose a continuous prose piece on a
subject close to his heart, the poet of Buenos Aires’ old southside,
Evaristo Carriego. As a child Borges had been sequestered behind
the ornamentality of middle-class life. Palermo, the Palermo of the
street tough and prostitute, had exercised an early fascination
expressing itself in his accounts of the more colourful aspects of old
Buenos Aires. Hombre de la esquina rosada was originally sketched
out as Hombres pelearon in El idioma de los argentinos, and is
loosely based on his conversations with the retired gangster Nicolas
Paredes whom Borges had met during his early days with the Proa
circle. In a prologue to Evaristo Carriego Borges illustrates the
attractiveness of gangster-life with a dichotomy between the world of
books and the world of reality. Real life, the life of the street, happens
tantalisingly beyond his reach:
him with enough material for a book, even a comparatively short one.
He had set out to write a straight biography of the lunfardo poet, ‘[B]ut
when I began writing my book the same thing happened to me that
happened to Carlyle as he wrote his Frederick the Great. The more I
wrote, the less I cared about my hero.’244 The reference to Carlyle is
significant. Borges had acquired a taste for German by reading Sartor
Resartus while the family was in Geneva in 1914. The work is a satire
on academic idealism, written in English, but containing a lively
peppering of German philosophical language. Charmed by its
scatological asides (the hero’s name is Diogenes Teufelsdröckh,
which translates as Diogenes Devil’sdung) Borges was to transmit its
quirky construction to his biography of Carriego. However, what part
has Thomas Carlyle’s account of the mythical Professor
Teufelsdröckh to play in Borges’ early narrative? Carlyle’s
philosophical point of view provides some answers.
This is also a rarefied version of the God of the Gnostics. Now devoid
of human traits, but no less indifferent to human dilemmas, the
romantic God can't be placated, but only endured. This is the God
Borges ultimately contemplates in ‘Caminata’ and which requires his
vigilance to secure the sleeping streets in his own perception of them
as their «único espectador». 249
102
CHAPTER THREE
In Inquisiciones Borges is still concerned with the idea of God and the
tenuous position of human subjectivity, but his approach becomes
rather more pragmatic. He realises how language operates to fashion
existence not so much through philosophical means, but through quite
arbitrary linguistic circumstances. We have seen how his ideas shifted
from Fervor de Buenos Aires through Luna de enfrente and Cuaderno
San Martín, gradually becoming less dependent on an abstract
philosophical idealist concept of a quasi-personal relationship with
God and shifting towards a greater emphasis on language-use as a
conceptual resource. In Inquisiciones, and the works that follow it until
the late 1930s, where the idea of metaphysical dialogue reasserts
itself, Borges focuses less on an idealised human subjectivity (man
involved in an a rather one-sided dialogue with the eternal) than on
how we produce meaning through the manipulation of language’s
104
However, won’t this just mean that people become the users of a
language that allows them an illusory impression of reality? The world
contains an abundance of earthly effects, but won’t we just be a
benighted population of cloak-room attendants in the semantic hotel
endlessly arranging them, and rearranging them, to suit our own
picayune idea of order? To avoid the closure of such a system Borges
proposes a mystic solution: language might strive to construct an
autonomous literature living beyond the bounds of ordinary narrative.
Such literature becomes an analogue for the demiurge of Gnostic
philosophy serving as both creator of the semiotically mundane and
as intermediary between human beings and God. 252
Despite the ironic tone of the piece (Borges bolsters his case with
citations to a panoply of celebrated authors including Flaubert, Rubén
Darío, Quevedo, Keats, and Góngora), his intention here can 260 be
seen as the construction of a preliminary position for his theory of
language, and especially for the position that our interaction with the
world is essentially grammatical:
Whose censures Borges feels the need to defend himself against are
unknown, but he’s probably dusting-off the gloves against the
egomarchs of early twentieth-century literature. What really matters is
his opinion that people aren't people first and word-using organisms
second, but that their very being is determined by grammatical
relations. Such an idea is hardly new to either sociology or
psychology. What comes as a surprise is the emphasis Borges places
on the word over other social relations. Words are at a premium, they
don’t just facilitate social relations, they exist as the formal
encodification of what it means to be truly human and civilised. In
pretended defense of his ideas Borges answers invisible critics
championing a subject whose material existence or spiritual ambition
determines their subjectivity by rejoining:
Such a statement is hardly startling these days. One can find intricate,
and by now even venerable, elaborations of it under the pen of the
post-Russellites, particularly the later Wittgenstein, Quine, Austin and
Searle. For the last twenty years it has been the main plank
supporting the Davidsonian school’s assaults on the learnability of
language. A strict adherence to grammatical rules alone is shown to
be wholly inadequate for the establishment of meaning. Davidson
might even have begun his work from Borges’riposte: «Esta doctrina
se apoya en el consenso del vulgo y las diccionarios la fortalecen». 304
concepts they were associated with would supply their sense equally
well. 315 Words exist only in the presence of other words, by which
they're inevitably coloured by the linguistic associations of the
individual who perceives them. Because of this rather chaotic
existence their heterodoxical nature is assumed. They have no
identity as entity. «[L]a no existencia de las categorías gramaticales»
disproves them as anything but floating symbols of conceptual
expectation waiting to be interpreted according to our first
impressions. 316 Words are still important as such, for without these
symbols there would be no way to pursue this discussion, but their
importance is better seen in relation to their activity with other words
than in themselves.
While this seems a contradiction, and a plea for arbitrary order in the
kingdom of words, these grammatical classifications operate at a
higher level of abstraction than their syntactic components. 326 While
the actual grammatical name of a word, be it ‘preposition,’‘article’or
‘substantive’ can't, as Borges believes, determine the activity of the
word in its interaction with other verbal signs, the ways in which
groups of words are held to interact within the sentence-frame may be
accurately described by the grammatical names given to their voice,
or subject-position. Thus, Borges’ belief in the usefulness of
classification springs from the acceptance of modal argument, in that
the subject finds its existence in a certain range of possibilities. If
words don't exist at the level of individual particles of thought, but
always rely on their contextual environment to lend them the
necessary colour stopping them fading into linguistic transparency,
the formal classification of the ways in which they operate functions
as a metatheory of signification.
Todas las ideas son afines o pueden serlo. Los contrarios lógicos
pueden ser palabras sinónimas para el arte: su clima, su temperatura
emocional suele ser común. 330
However, how does history get into the act? When words are
arbitrarily combined into verbal complexes like el idioma argentino, or
the equine examples above, the individual words composing them are
felt to have had a pre-existent affinity. Their union is literally legalised
129
I think a writer is being changed all the time by his output. So that
perhaps at first what he writes is not relevant to him. And if he goes
on writing, he’ll find that those things are ringing a bell all the time. 354
3.2.7 Whitman
In a previous essay in Discusión published in 1932 Borges had
outlined one way of getting around the conceptual limitations of
language by refocussing on the role that creative biographical
imagination can have in removing artists from the direct ambit of their
particular works. The artist, through doubling himself as biographical
entity and autobiographical fiction, escapes reality’s need for historical
self-reference. In ‘El otro Whitman’ Borges applies the principle of
defamiliaristion to a study of one his favourite English-language poets.
He also takes a swipe at the tendency of “schools” of literature to
politicise poetry in terms of cliques, a phenomenon he'd experienced
directly in Madrid and Seville with the rivalry between the Ultraístas
and the Surrealistas, and later again in the early 1920s when the
editorial conclave of Martín Fierro erupted into the Boedo-Florida
controversy. 369 One can't understand poets by exacting an economy
of their works. The true worth of poets is gauged on the capability of
136
And of the threads that connect the stars and of wombs and of
the father-stuff. 372
Many have been afflicted with this notable ambition, from Apollonius
of Rhodes to Mallarmé, who sought it not in positive works of art, but
in a negative realm of symbolic absences. The list names Homer’s
Odyssey of course, but also includes Góngora’s Soledades, and
James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.375 Surprisingly Shakespeare and
Tolstoy aren't mentioned, presumably because these authors already
rely on metaphor as such, rather than on juxtapositions that lead to
metaphors. Borges’criterion for the universal book obviously rests on
the role we play in text construction. This provides Borges with a way
of reintroducing us into artistic production in a pragmatic sense: books
don’t read books, people do.
138
376
3.3 Pragmatics of the text
For Borges the task of the art work is not so much to reproduce life,
but to recreate it. This recreation is literally beyond the page because
the ‘sympathies and differences’it lays down are beyond the facts of
direct human experience. Their link with life is one of vicarious
substitution and recombination. Beyond Whitman’s jumbled imagery
lies an exercise of imagination finding sense in a haphazard
conjunction of factual experience. Borges notes a parallel in the more
esoteric texts of religion and philosophy:
another name for the act of belief? One can't imagine completely
impossible things. Phantasies are always composed of elements that
have been experienced in waking reality, and so we react to them as
if they were really there before us - this is what makes nightmare such
an effective experience.
The Holy Spirit's also therefore the antithesis of the earthly author. Its
own words are already dictated for it: as a part of the Trinity it
partakes of the Godhead, and this Godhead is omniscient,
omnipresent and eternal. Logically the chance effects of literature
diminish geometrically the higher up the pyramid of spiritual writing we
go. There are no fortuitous accidents for the Heavenly script writer. 386
Borges notes that the cause of awe for this book is a direct
association with its divine creator. The Holy Scripture is the
mechanical production of God, the Evangelists as His secretaries,
having no influence on the text they write. Inspiration favours
transcription, not interpretation. 387 In this way the text can remain free
of the human hand. This view has improbable consequences when
the historical texts of the Scriptures are considered: the Formula
consensus helvética, a 16th century Protestant compendium of
orthodox religious practice is supposed to declare that even the
punctuation of the Bible is of divine origin, forgetting that
orthographical symbols are of comparatively recent invention. Islam
142
Sacred writing, on the other hand, can't afford to take such liberties.
Each word is significant, therefore its order is significant. In the
absence of artistic criteria of judgement logical ones might take over.
Holy Scripture is the word of God after all, and logically God might
have said it as it was written. The order of the words thus takes on a
primal significance that can't obtain in poetry. For the cabbalist
143
Here the sensitivities, through the senses, are elevated to the role of
arbiters of poetic life. However, why chase off intellectual schemata
by claiming that the idea of a definitive text is nothing more than a
tired old religious idea? 390 Intellectualising writing is how we come to
recognise it as writing in the first place. One senses a philosophical
divide coming up. Just as the Absolute Text is a logical idea, so is its
Absolute Author. This way leads to Platonism, but also paradoxically
to the destruction of Platonism itself. If the absolute text is
acknowledged as a logical idea, then why shouldn’t God be
acknowledged likewise, and both be consigned to the vagaries of
144
Coming to Genre
Regarding the provisional nature of explanation, Todorov describes
the example of a graduate student trying to cartographise a particular
genre. Buried under piles of books in his (sic) search he can never be
sure of having exhausted the category, of possessing it as an artefact
of consciousness. Such a search is, of course, unnecessary.
Scientific research relies on the examination of a limited number of
cases and the extrapolation of their shared characteristics into a
model that is more or less self-consistent. However, as sceptics are
fond of pointing out, such a course of action can't guarantee certainty,
because,
All this is very well, as long as the argument remains at the level of
meta-literary description. Of course, a genre is composed of its
constituent components, and of course, the addition of components
will force a reappraisal of the genre into which these new specimens
are earnestly trying to fit. However, what of a generic semiotic
collection? What about language per se? The name we give to
language automatically encompasses all its possibilities because of
the categorical sleight of hand we employ: a sign fits into “language”
because, qua sign, it can't exist anywhere else. 395 Todorov allows his
argument to ascend from literary depths to semiotic heights when he
claims that,
Todorov is right, but let’s look at Croce for a minute. Croce’s rejection
of genre is based on seeing the irreducible character of each work,
but we should remember the argument is based on a perceived
inability to separate aesthetic and linguistic phenomena. For Croce
linguistic problems are really conceptual ones dressed in semiotic
guise. Croce uses “aesthetic” to mean conceptual in the weak
psychological sense that a creative doctrine of mental associationism
requires. Remember how Borges uses it in the same way. The
aesthetic/conceptual continuously enlarges its prospect by successive
recombination of its existing linguistic resources. As he points out,
[T]he error (of differentiating the conceptual and the linguistic) has
arisen from having failed to grasp the general principle of Aesthetic,
known to us: that expressions already produced must descend to the
rank of impressions before they can give rise to new impressions.
When we utter new words we generally transform the old ones,
varying or enlarging their meaning... 397
never get off the ground because of the intractably slippery fit of the
word “genre” with the phenomenon it is said to describe. Because the
linguistic and the aesthetic/conceptual uses of the word “genre” don't
coincide, it's impossible to reach a point of entry into the process.
Each use plays off the other infecting, and being infected in turn, by
the point of view of the user. To overcome this process the
assignment of genre becomes arbitrary, and must be viewed
provisionally, if it's to be viewed at all. For Todorov,
This presents no problems at the level of genre: each genre fits, for
the purposes of arbitrary description, within a provisional category
called literature. However, it presents an obvious problem for
language as the master-set of all the semiotic sub-sets comprising it,
since it alone can't be reduced to a position of abstraction. Language
might exist, if it exists at all, as a totality that can't be viewed from an
‘outside’since we are always already inside language when we make
the attempt. Todorov’s ‘degrees of abstraction’ therefore become
impossible, since to even pose the problem of language in language
is to become enmeshed in a game of repercussive signification, a fact
of which Derrida, for one and Borges for another, is keenly aware. 400
CHAPTER FOUR
Borges has made his opposition to the realist novel patently clear. His
antagonism stems from what he feels to be an excess of
psychological detail detracting from the main business of literature -
the concise representation of events serving to transmit meaning.
Psychological description, which seeks to uncover the motivation for
the events themselves, is clearly superfluous. Worse, psychological
descriptions lead to contradictory readings of the novel’s characters.
This fact, combined with the excess of surface detail necessary in
realist literature, create a booming confusion that is the death of the
novel. 402
have held such eccentric opinions and still be received so well by the
international artistic community? One solution is to ignore these
outbursts as trivial and concentrate on the major works that have
garnered him a deservedly wide literary celebrity. 407 Another, as
Pierre Macherey points out, is to attribute them to Borges’ famous
‘irony’ and explain them away as provocative asides. 408 Yet, another
is to critically examine them and try to effect a compromise between
his anti-psychologism on the one hand, and his wealth of
psychological inference in the ficciones.409 My approach is to take
Borges’ objections seriously and extract an anti-psychological,
magically causal theory of the novel from his writings.
[M]urió sin lástimas. No sirve sino pa juntar moscas, dijo uno que, al
final, lo palpó. Murió de pura patria; las guitarras varonas del bajo se
alborozaron. 412
152
the sheer effort of filling three or four hundred pages. Borges’ other
objection is based on the idea of climactic narrative punctuation
shaking us out of our complacency and forcing us to participate in the
action as if we were experiencing real events. Borges considers the
difficulties of Morris’ verse novel in terms of facilitating the reader’s
entry into the art work:
She fears for them, yet understands them. Will her own love be less
destructive for Jason than that of the Nereids for his crew? However,
Morris keeps the Sirens at a little poetic distance to increase their
156
Borges read Poe as a youth and was, as we’ve found, intrigued by the
Symbolists’ theory of autonomous poetic creation. Borges, in his
essay on narrative art and magic, likewise criticises expository
psychologism, but this time from the further conviction that it's
altogether impossible to accurately render the psyche via intellectual
description. One might rely, at the level of description, for the
managed play of images leading to an inescapable conclusion (not
the natural one coming about by ‘the incessant result of uncontrollable
and infinite operations’) 426, and this conclusion will be the governing
metaphor for the work of art against which every event and action will
be seen to take place, as if by the laws of determinism. This symbolic,
or ‘magical’causality is allowed to emerge through the lucidly placed
details foreshadowing an ineluctable conclusion.
One might think the author has made his point clearly enough for the
ears of the listener: the fantastic attracts our attention, the attendant
horror of its description causes us to suspend disbelief, participating
in the text as if by an irresistible attractant. 430 We are frankly shocked
into belief. Such a theory is at least old as Coleridge, older in fact,
159
are distanced from the character by the horror of the act, and the lack
of psychological portraiture beyond the simple strategy of means,
motive, opportunity and a rather untragic urge for self-preservation.
We don't, unless we are sociopaths, identify with either victim or
villain, and the conclusion can't affect our moral judgements beyond
the banalities of judging action good or bad. 440
The conspiracy hinges on the ambiguity between the word and the
number it represents, but there is no opportunity for us to participate
in the action above the level of interested spectator. Our activity is
directed to the metatext of the puzzle. 442 Because of this the
characters are dispensable, serving only to hinge the action between
the folds of narrative making up the content of the tale. 443 Having
grasped the fact of substitution of a number for a word we’re free to
apply the trick to other experiences, while forgetting the particulars of
the individual story. The substitutive act that the story embodies can
therefore be considered open-ended, and interminably applicable,
and the story likewise. We are free to make the declaration so often
heard by devotees of crime fiction, reading of an especially
noteworthy murder they seem to recognise, that it was “just like” The
Horrendous Happenstance of the Hirsute Herring, or some other work
with an equally improbable title.
163
No one can doubt the importance of this key essay in the evolution of
Borges’major ficciones. Four Faultless Felons by G. K. Chesterton is
obviously an influence on ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ where an
expeditious murder announces the secret invasion of the Allies in the
First World War, just as the word-game of ‘The Loyal Traitor’449
patently prefigures the cabbalistic subterfuge of the aptronymic Red
Scharlach in ‘Death and the Compass’, 450 while the tale of the Indian’s
careless knife is echoed in a number of tales, including the murder in
Borges’first real short narrative ‘Streetcorner Man’.
164
How then is one to understand the gaucho as such and lift him off the
background of his literary creation? The description of the gaucho as
symbol obviously relies on the literature that spawned him. Attempting
a historical extraction is therefore doomed to failure. At the same time
one can't deny the actual basis for the literary creation: the gaucho did
exist as historical fact. To resolve the contradiction between the real
and symbolic gaucho Borges acknowledges the necessary role of the
author in the creation of myth. Authors create symbols that outlive
them, and they outlive their authors by being so variously defined, but
so universal in quality, they can effect an ideal affinity with successive
literatures:
This seems like a paradox, but it's consistent with a view of the
existence of characters in fiction as the individual embodiments of a
definite repertoire of recurrent attributes. This repertoire constitutes
their symbolic existence, but does not over-ride their personal
qualities. These remain the province of biography: fictional characters
have a wealth of biographical detail without which they'd remain flat
and two-dimensional - perfect fodder for the conventionalist.
One might think a gaucho poem that doesn’t specify ‘day or night, [or
even] the markings of horses’472 wouldn’t satisfy our expectations, but
it is just this limitation that allows our act of poetic faith to become
better established:
her motivational credentials. She is a person who would act nobly and
successfully in other circumstances, therefore her character is
definable in terms of her potential for admirable action. She functions
as the marker of noble action, even if her warning is doomed to be
unheard. Martín Fierro too is the embodiment of the tragic impulse
and reflection. The heroic deserter gaucho who will be killed so
ingloriously by a stranger in a bar-fight contemplates what his life has
become in incredulity:
4.2.4 Superstition
Borges continues his critique of particularising forces in literature in
‘La supersticiosa ética del lector’. This time the reader’s ‘superstitious
ethic’comes about as the product of excessive attention to the details
of the work, instead of to the larger impressions to be gained from a
less factitious reading. Borges uses the position of stylistic critique
he'd developed in ‘La poesía gauchesca’ to account for the general
un-universality of Argentine literature:
la adjetivación no debe ser trivial y opinarán que está mal escrita una
página si no hay sorpresas en la juntura de adjetivos con sustantivos,
aunque su finalidad general esté realizada. 486
174
Although such a declaration is not unique - one finds this sort of thing
also being written by Symbolists, Vorticists, Futurists and
Surrealists 489 - it does allow Borges to found his views on what should
motivate the new writing. Yet, the passage he quotes contains a
performative contradiction and a cultural disjuncture. The Spanish
Ultraístas were interested in the modern age, in aeroplanes,
locomotives and the telephone. Seeing no way to avoid such
technological bric-à-brac they embraced it. Of course, they were
motivated by a reaction against their own founding fathers - the
Modernistas, whose outlook was romantic and proto-nostalgic, their
verse complex, highly structured, and lexically dense. 490 (Hence
Borges’earlier criticisms of ‘adjectivisation’ above.) In order to move
away from these new rather Gongoristic poets (like Salvador Rueda
Santos 1857-1933, Antonio Machado y Ruiz 1875-1939, and Miguel
de Unamuno y Jugo 1864-1936, usually simply referred to as
Unamuno) the Spanish Ultraístas adopted a free verse style of
varying metre, simple imagery and personal voice to communicate
their rebellion against what they saw as a stifling oppression by the
academicians. 491 However, the rebellion in Spain had only the
romanticised campesino peasantry to kick against, which seemed
rather socially negligent. To embrace what Asséns called
contemporary life was no better, since the technologising rhetoric of
Ultraism in the Old World necessitated an equally callous celebration
of the machine age, and by default, of those who were now to be cast
as the exploiters of human labour. Trapped by the professed but
175
Yet, while the metaphors are novel, their raw material is linguistically
conventional. Founding a new poetry on an old sub-stratum can only
be excused if the means by which it's created is radically different,
hence the Ultraístas’ reliance on formal innovation as a way of
departing from classical Modernism. 494 Whether or not they were
successful is a debatable point - despite irregular metre and phrasing
there are at least as many nightingales and moonlit nights in the
successor as in the predecessor. However, this matters less than the
effect such propagandising had on Borges’ideas about the strategies
of poetic thought. 495 Borges sought an Ultraism that «tiende a la meta
primicial de toda poesía, a la transmutación de la realidad palpable
del mundo en realidad interior y emocional». 496 This is what drives
him in the later essays to eschew the virtues of local colour and
excessive description. The gaucho Martín Fierro is validated in
Borges’ eyes when he desists from the physical and opts for the
eternal and philosophical. The payadores of the outskirts emerge into
their true life, that of interior and emotional reality, when they forget
they are colourful characters and begin speaking like human beings
struggling with the dilemmas of existence.
Figure 1
[A]s to whether the poems in Fervor are ultraist or not, the answer -
for me - was given by my friend and French translator Néstor Ibarra,
who said, “Borges left off being an ultraist poet with the first ultraist
poem he wrote.”500
Whether Borges really did depart from his own programme or not is a
moot point. One thing is certain. The first and fourth points of his
178
Una de las más frías aberraciones que las historias literarias registran
son las menciones enigmáticas o kenningar de la poesía de Islandia.
Cundieron hacia el año 100: tiempo en que los thulir o rapsodas
repetidores anónimos fueron desposeídos por los escaldos, poetas
de intención personal. 501
The kenningar were stock metaphors for climactic events in the life of
the Icelandic warrior. Because if this they assumed a quasi-magical
power as the verbal expression of physical acts. One sees the same
thing with the incantation of magic formulae whose very words are felt
to possess unseen, possibly malevolent, potential. Our own
experience today is not wholly denuded of such phenomena. The
tapu, a word that can't be uttered for fear of attracting the mana that
informs the spiritual universe, is still a feature of ordinary life in
Polynesia. The ban on the name of a dead person in Australian
Aboriginal culture, together with a complete name change for all the
members of the deceased’s immediate family, speaks eloquently for
the power of ritual silence. 503 Borges goes on to explain that the
Icelandic kenningar partakes of this tradition, but instead of the
suppression of the word, they clothe it in other vestments. 504
Kenningar operate as the linguistic paraphrase of sacred phenomena,
concealing their power through the symbolic transference of the event
into (primarily) visual imagery. Thus, the periphrases for battle and
corpse become magically transmogrified into tempestad de espadas
(sword storm) and alimento de cuervos (crows’food) respectively. 505
Gull’s meadow is obviously the sea, while being a bison reflects the
power of the appellation, leading to the image of a ship at sea, which
in this case refers to Thor, for it was Thor who was powerful enough
to kill the giants’ offspring. Thor, as the killer of the giants’ offspring
can't so easily be reduced to a visual equivalent since it relates to
mythical history, while gull’s meadow approximates to sword’s water
and crow’s food. This is the second order of metaphoric description.
In eschewing visual imagery for a quasi-historical reference it settles
itself in the human present as a marker to the past, even if that past is
totally fantastic. This is the nub of narrative convention: things have
180
when torn bodily from its unfortunate owner and left to bleach in the
sun - brings us face-to-face with its elemental horror. What Borges
calls ‘the honour of metaphysics’ is the identification of the strange
and terrifying in ordinary life. Such an honour can't surely be garnered
from the realistic treatment of life, or the attempt to portray
psychological motives as the outcome of an inherently logical and
mimetic process of association. Freud is a logician of the psyche,
hence Borges opposes his method. 520 Metaphors must be kept
strange and inexplicable if they're to retain their power to shock,
without which they'd have no interest. A fantastic tale without anything
fantastic in it is unthinkable.
It's not the perfections alone of literature that make it immortal, but its
imperfections as well. Borges discounts the idea of technical
perfection as a verbal idea embodied in words such as ‘perfection’
itself. Such words postulate an unreachable target having no place in
human art, although they're part of the normal technicality of artistic
creation. What makes them effective is the image of the state they
purport to describe. In ordinary life a perfect work must somehow be
preferable to an imperfect one, if we are lexically, and conceptually,
orthodox. Borges rejects the idea on the basis that what is described
when we use the word “perfect” is a semantic distinction
masquerading as a qualitative one. Speaking of this defect in critics
he says,
[N]o piensan que decir de más una cosa es tan de inhábiles como no
decirla del todo, y que la descuidada generalización e intensificacción
es una pobreza y que así la siente el lector. 536
Of course, for Borges a balance might be struck between art and the
human in the art work, otherwise it loses its ability to convince us of its
reality. Poetic faith can only be achieved, as in the example of Morris’
The Life and Death of Jason, by allowing the reader to create
192
However, even if City Lights had antedated its Trojan exemplar the
problem of the film’s stagy unreality would have to be overcome. An
elephant in the street is extraordinary, but it's only extraordinary
because of a geographic conjunction. Elephants aren't unusual in the
zoo. Hands and billiard balls aren't unusual either, but when our
attention is directed to them so painstakingly, as in Ozep’s film of the
crimes of the Karamasov bastard, they assume a significance
commensurate with their status as icons of the real world. To be real
in the sense of art is to be super-real. Like the agonisingly jerky
progress of the baby-carriage in Battleship Potemkin exultant horror
can be wrung from the most mundane subjects:
This grafting-on may be obvious, indeed it can't help but be. The
audience is aware it's experiencing a transcribed reality whether it
cares to admit it or not. To reason otherwise would be to insert Greta
Garbo into the culture in which her image is portrayed as a native
artefact. Such a thing is unimaginable, intolerable, one would have to
be a cultural schizoid to even consider it. 557 The iconography of an
age is culture-bound, essentially untranslatable. The revoicing of
images would be an assault on both the transmitter and the receiver
alike. The transmitter culture would dilute the identity of its icons, and
the receiver would relinquish cultural autonomy by allowing the
intruder to be accepted by its unwitting audience. Dubbing is
attempted cultural seduction, and, thank goodness, it isn’t even
successful since it involves the audience in an all-too-obvious deceit:
the act of transformation rather than the act of revelation. Jekyll into
Hyde and back again, all achieved with time-lapse photography and
the application of mutton-chops. What was conceived as a morality
tale is deformed into a tableau of special effects, an ironic parody of
the original where exaggeration (wild Hyde) takes the place of
restraint (modest Jekyll).
Borges’ irony is clear and his point is well made. Because the
expressive is eternal he has no need to verify it. The Crocean
directive exists beyond the justification of its textual representation in
the words on the page of a book, just as Borges’own expression of a
thought needs no other justification than its mere presence. The
intuition of the image of eternity is already eternal through being
expressed, just as its logical concept persists in our consciousness. 564
By stating the argument in these terms he includes himself within the
eternal production of art through the expression of both a conceptual
image and the logical concept accompanying it: «El arte es expresión
y sólo expresión, postularé aquí» 565
Borges proceeds to defend his use of the word ‘image’ against the
more Crocean “intuition”. Intuitions are direct sensory data that are
shaped by their logical operation. To intuit is to form a sensation
within the functional limits of the concept where it occurs. However, it
may be objected the word image connotes a strictly visual
phenomenon. To translate the Crocean intuition by image is not to
substitute a visual word for a conceptual one Borges argues, because
the Latin imago from which it derives, means image in the sense of
representation, or simulation. The “image” of a thing is already its
mental representation, regardless of the sensory pathway used to
apprehend it.
Can metaphor operate on the page, as it were, and still have a lasting
effect? The kenningar are the ‘honour of metaphysics, its
remuneration and its source.’578 To think of a metaphor involving a
peculiarly horrific image is to implant it within not only our textual
consciousness, but within the ordinary waking world. Disjuncture
operates at the textual level, but it always refers to the world beyond
itself. 579 The power of metaphor springs not, therefore, from its
fantastic quality, but from its realistic possibilities. However, metaphor
need not always be horrific, the pathology of the image is merely an
interesting case for illustration:
El hecho puede tal vez resolverse así. Las cosas (pienso) no son
intrínsecamente poéticas; para ascenderlas a poesía, es preciso que
los vinculemos a nuestro vivir, que nos acostumbremos a pensarlas
con devoción.580
Our part hasn’t been reduced to the level of mere interpreter of facts
in the text, but has been elevated to that of active collaborator in the
production of poetic meaning. Poetry only exists when two factors are
in simultaneous operation: the linking of our lives to the art work, and
the effort of the reader to imbue the art work with an affective
potential. If this reciprocity is not an ordinary feature of daily life it can
only be because the public reception of literature has been divided
between categories of the poetic and the non-poetic. The poetic
obtains to the usual features of high-art: a certain preciousness,
restraint, life with all the vigour civilised out of it. The non-poetic,
exploited as a living resource, is conversational in the best sense,
charged with the materiality of its expression:
empty even though it’s packed to the brim with detailed description. 582
This is poetry, in Croce’s words, that's become ‘superior to itself’and
therefore loses its value as a conceptual prompt. 583 On the other hand
a few words in a relatively minor English author’s reminiscences of
childhood can have a startling effect. 584 This effect derives from the
radical conjunction of dissimilar images, but this conjunction can only
take place with poetic effect within an already formalised environment.
Once we know a text is “poetry”, and the poetic text forms part of a
genre with its own special rules, we can assimilate any textual item to
the general requirement of being poetry. The only criteria for aesthetic
judgement remaining are qualitative; poetry is either good or bad
depending on the success with which its metaphors are intermeshed.
The “literary” on the other hand is prosaic because it is foregrounded
in everyday experience. To discover metaphor in the literary is to fail
to play the categorical game. That's why metaphor is post-poetic; its
effects predate the artificial codes of poetry as high-art and rely on the
power of functional speech. If it's “seen” as poetic this is only because
the “poetry” which followed it out of lived and prehistoric experience is
being in turn seen by eyes dimmed to the possibility of an intrinsic
poetry within ordinary language.
Just as the dubbed image displaces its original and robs the audience
of an authentic experience, parody and allegory rob us of an
interpretation arrived at through their own efforts. Don Quijote is a
parody, therefore it's inferior to its original. Don Quijote is an allegory,
therefore we need not read it for itself, but only for what it can be said
to represent. Borges is highly antagonistic to both views. For him the
211
For Borges the character of Don Quijote achieves life beyond the
page through his isolation as a textual object. Don Quijote is a
presence whose self-referentiality never descends to self-parody.
Because of this, knowing Borges’ view on parody, it follows he
functions as an authentic presence. Unlike Shakespeare’s Prince
Hamlet, who, feigning madness, solves a moral problem
intellectually, 595 or Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, whose perpetual self-
awareness makes him into an existential clock-watcher, Don Quijote
lives in the grip of a madness he does not understand as such, and so
fails to respond to it as outside his being. For Don Quijote chivalry is
all the world’s way of doing things. 596 In naturalising madness the
Knight of the Mournful Countenance lives an existence determined
not by self-reflection, but by a code of ethical conduct expressed in
positive emotion and feeling. Unlike the procrastinating Hamlet or the
narcissistic Raskolnikov (it could be argued these heroes are
paradigms of emotional negativity, their whole being is expressed
through the non-performance of ritual acts, i.e. revenge in the first
case and confession in the second) Don Quijote obeys a ‘lucid and
limited’progress whose details are prophetic in relation to the textual
universe informing it, the knightly romance as a code of conduct. 597
212
CHAPTER FIVE
World as Text:
Grammar of the Eternal Labyrinth
The previous chapter showed how characters in the text may be read
as symbolic complexes, and how this complex relationship is
corrosive to a view of the subject in literature as the embodiment of an
enduring psychological personality. 598 Psychological autonomy can't
account for the variety of views of the subject the text offers, and
indeed makes necessary, if its symbolic regimen is to be admitted.
We saw that in Borges the text obeys regulation by means of
intermittent punctuations of the reading-surface by the recurrence of
key images operating by the magic causality of homoeopathesis and
sympathetic association. The task of the author is to produce a
complex of symbolic associations allowing the characters in a text to
live their own lives as incorporations of the reader’s own symbolic
framework. In this way the reader and the read experience organic
satisfaction at the surface of the page. We become conscious
participants in the text, exercising affective assent to the conditions
that pertain there. This assent operates simultaneously through two
strategies: suspension of disbelief, and what I have been referring to
as Radical Objective Identification (ROI), where the primitive image is
recognised both as an atomic constituent of the symbolic complex to
which it belongs, and also as an autonomous and interchangeable
element of other symbolic complexes in other texts. The task of the
present chapter is to further refine this notion of symbolic
interchangeability, reading it not only within the text, but as a feature
of the genre where the text resides. Just as symbolic complexes differ
within the text, so texts differ within genre. The text therefore can be
seen as the nexus of a range of meta-symbolic operations troubling
the surface of genre. A reading of metaphor and analogy is again
fundamental to such an inquiry, and is here undertaken through a
critique of rhetorical strategies in Saussure and Derrida.
213
What does the act of reading require of the reader structurally? The
Preface to Of Grammatology subtly unwinds the doxies of narrative:
...the structure preface-text becomes open at both ends. The text has
no stable identity, stable origin...each act of reading ‘the text’ is a
preface to the next. The reading of a self-professed preface is no
exception to this rule.601
The notion of revelation, and its opposite, disguise, can only operate
within a framework of psychological intentionality of a personal nature.
219
Post-cards
No secret Derrida prefers the form of the distant dialogue to the
insistent monologue. His theory of self-presence as an undisclosed
indicability serving to name the world through gestures of description
demands it. How else could the claims of self-presence
(self=presence) be filtered through a deconstructive reading so as to
evade the charge of falling prey to this very tendency? The logicality
of scientific explanation works to produce a transparent text without
the resources of metaphor. However, it can't escape, for Derrida at
least, from its own metaphoric pre-transcriptions in the texts of
philosophy, which by this time have come to adhere to its every word
like clusters of ship-fast barnacles. As Norris shows, expression as
the ‘breath’or ‘soul’of meaning, and language as the mere physical
‘body’ that it comes to animate, conceals the possibility that the lust
for power that informs the naming functionality of indication may be
already present in conceiving the relation itself. 613 But how is Derrida
to turn the trick of persistent textual self-presence without becoming
its victim himself? His tactic is to elude the claims power is waiting to
make by emptying the name of différance of its indicative capacity
and operating this remote-controlled vehicle behind the slide from
difference to deferral (and back again). 614 If, as he reasons, in the
case of Husserl’s conception of the conditions by which the linguistic
content of minds is mapped onto consciousness to give an image of
meaning, Husserl’s phenomenology relies on an immediacy that can
be questioned, if it's the ‘total and immediate access’- a claim physics
and neurology both contradict - to thoughts that guarantees self-
presence that can be shown as an impossibility, then Derrida’s
différance as an activity of interrogation insures itself under the
Saussurian terms in which it's framed. 615
usually continued by the addition of the previous ordinal plus “1”, just
as the series of prime numbers is fixed by the addition of the
subsequent prime. The letters “a”, “b”, “c”, “d” don't form a series,
since there is no generative rule for their relations. The letters of the
alphabet aren't a series, but an associative sequence. This might be
merely a logical quirk were it not for the insight it provides into a bent
in linguistics colouring it with a systematicity it does not actually
possess. 619 Where Saussure posits a relation that is syntagmatic he
does so on the basis of an unspoken sequentiality supposed to exist
between terms usually found together. His example of architecture,
where the architrave is supposed to suggest the columns that support
it, regardless of whether we see them, illustrates what Hume calls a
‘lively expectation’of seeing them again in such a conjunction rather
than a relation. 620 Why should the same rule of thumb not be applied
to language? What relation is there between nouns and verbs, say,
other than the lively expectation of those future conjunctions
constituting grammatical writing? However, what of apparently
ungrammatical utterances that constitute speech for Derrida’s
purposes? Saussure begins to allow the arbitrariness of language in
recognising that ‘in the syntagm there is no clear-cut boundary
between the language fact, which is a sign of collective usage, and
the fact that belongs to speaking and depends on individual
freedom,’621 but stops short of employing the notion of seriality at one
remove from the shifting centres of his ‘constellations,’ as an
economy of present absence Derrida will first sketch in his discussion
of Heidegger’s kreuzweise Durchstreichung, or cross-wise striking-
through, of terms in order to let one see them before their
transcendental “meaning” has occluded their activity as deferring
parts of speech. 622
224
the “bad” that which has only let us perpetuate error by the application
of ‘a metaphorical expression’. 626 However, is this enough? Condillac
proposes another bifurcation, this time from the empirical fork, in
order to establish the good metaphysics in a prelinguistic Eden of
sensation and reflection on sensation, thus leading to conjunctions of
ideas and true reason. He lets the bad limb of metaphor, which can
only serve to offer illusions of knowledge through vain recombinations
of words giving rise to ideas, wither and die without noticing its
disease is of a systemic quality. It has always already poisoned the
main trunk from which the new branch shoots and divides, its disease
is the disease of the entire tree whose cure is fruitless because it can
never get under way. 627
What has caused this terror of metaphor for the empirical Abbé, and
how is one to avoid it? Derrida isolates two strategies for allaying his
disquiet: the urge to retrace one’s sources (critique of Aristotle), and
the desire to supply knowledge allowing explanation in a series. 628 If
we are to speak like nature we should do so as she herself speaks, in
a strictly “organic” and “progressive” way, not as the result of
reasoning from general phenomena to isolated examples. Derrida’s
Condillac is committed to the purge from reason of its metaphorical
impetus that arises as the result of ‘deficiency’, and which is evinced
in instances of the ‘epistemological myths’ resupplying its negative
economy of signification. 629 This is negativity in its Saussurian dress,
of course, since deficiency here operates for Derrida as a general
principle allowing meaning its other existence as signans modo, or
‘signifying just now’in the differential of apprehension. 630
Condillac’s apprehensions spring from the idea that analogy (or rather
the urge to analogise and thereby constantly, but never perfectly,
supply the voracious appetite of meaning) is constantly led off-target
by a persistently held theory of knowledge that can't allow its
practitioners to see the apparently natural relationships between
concepts. Epistemology, as a series of myths concerning conceptual
relationships that have departed from their original relatively simple
and unrecomposed being as concepts present to consciousness (we
should remember the famous sentient statue that could tell the
difference between two flower’s perfumes on the basis they occurred
at different times and with different qualities) is always ready to
subvert the process of analogy with its historical lumber. Seeing the
227
“himself” had not laid down the rule of this debate’633 there is still the
question of whether or not his system is as self-divided as he
supposes.
How is the lever to be applied, and where shall lie its divisive fulcrum?
Derrida reads the objections of a contemporary, Maine de Biran, in
order to locate the shifting point of equilibrium, and arrives at
confirmation of the double-theory theory. 637 In a text already rich
enough in mechanical, chemical, and organisational metaphors to
guarantee it a putative existence in Condillac’s own thought (Derrida
writes of ‘dissolving,’ the systems’ ‘working’ and the forming of a
‘routine’), 638 he comes to the conclusion that by reading Condillac
against the ground of his critic, one may discern an economy of
repetition that constitutes reading as the ground of analogy. 639
in its relation to the text containing it, and the texts trying to counter it,
including Derrida’s own, so the relationships revealed allow a glimpse
of analogy as the producer of an excess of signification. Condillac
recognised this side effect of metaphor (analogy’s condensed off-
spring) as the frivolity that exists as the recognition of excess as
uselessness. To define frivolity as such in the Dictionnaire alerts
Derrida to the possibility that where Condillac places such a historical
burden on metaphor as ‘a vague principle’in the Essay he does so to
evade the responsibilities that the production of excess might bring.
To defer the conclusion that his own work too might fall within the
orbit of the metaphorical habit of mind Condillac is determined to
employ the “circular” arguments of the Dictionnaire in his Langue des
calculs, saying of excess, difference, remainder:
Let us recall that we can go only from the known to the unknown.
Now, how can we go from one to the other? We can because the
unknown is found in the known, and it is only there because it's the
same thing. 646
attempts to describe: one can't distinguish what will not remain still,
one can't defer what has already slipped by. To speak, even ironically,
of ‘an indicative stratum’ and ‘an expressive core’ of language is to
locate speech, not to mention writing, at the parallel intersections of
signification’s supposed laminality. 653 Language is at the bas-cœ ur of
its own mythological process.
phonetic features with a verbal root to produce new forms along the
lines of these other previous forms. The process is ‘paraplastic’in that
the new form is constructed by an imitation of the old forms, or a
distinctive feature in them, not ‘metaplastic’ in that it springs into life
through a mysterious hybridisation. Saussure describes analogy as ‘a
play with a cast of three: (1) the traditional, legitimate heir; (2) the
rival; and (3) a collective character made up of the forms that created
the rival.’657 The analogy between the rival form and those elements
that make up its collective character is established through the
grafting of the distinctive feature of the collective onto the heir to make
the rival. Because this process involves both forms existing side by
side it appears obvious one (the heir) looks out of place and it
becomes increasingly difficult to employ it without the appearance of
inconsistency. Under the claims of the rival it atrophies and drops out
of view over time. Thus, language invents new forms, but does not
displace old ones immediately.
Don Quixote is perhaps one of the finest books ever written. Not
because of the plot - the plot is flimsy, the episodes go nowhere - but
the man, Alonso Quijano, who dreamt himself into Don Quixote is
perhaps one of our best friends. At least he is my best friend. Creating
a friend for the many generations to come is a feat which could hardly
be equalled. And Cervantes has done that. 671
Intersection between
Heir and Rival
Intersection of
Heir and Rival
Collectivity Heir
Premature
Collectivity incorproation of
of Forms: Rival into
Narrative Collectivity
In the Saussurean model of the play with a cast of three the Rival
usurps the Heir and returns to the collectivity of language from which
it has, presumably, risen. It becomes orthodox, “the way things are
243
The first linguists did not understand the nature of the phenomenon of
analogy, which they called “false analogy.” They thought that in
inventing honor, Latin “had made a mistake” concerning the prototype
honos. For them, everything that deviated from the original state was
an irregularity, a distortion of an ideal form. 672
The misrecognition of the Heir as the genuine form, which without the
overwhelming attraction of the existent paradigm that is waiting to
regularise it, would remain in view as a disruptive influence (it would
continue not to “make sense” when read against the ground of the
paradigmatic forms) constitutes an image of fictive misrecognition in
Borges as a complex of relations. The Borgesian narrative takes from
its resource-base of the collectivity of narrative what it needs for the
construction of its own little exercise, and in doing so creates an Heir
to narrative existing in two worlds: that of the narrative collectivity
making up all of its nameable instances (the “world of literature”), and
its newly developing sub-species, the Fiction. 673 That the Fiction can
only occupy the place of the Rival is evident from its readers’
misrecognition of the fact it operates as a double-movement between
the Heir and Collectivity. This is the reason the Borgesian Fiction
(ficción), to give it a name that has been waiting for it all along, is
mostly investigated as a small work of literature itself, as though it
merely continued narrative without unsettling it. The question I have
been investigating is not what Borges “means” to say in these
assemblages, but under what conditions he is able to assume the
position of saying anything at all.
244
The real beginning of my career as a story writer starts with the series
of sketches entitled Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal
History of Infamy), which I contributed to the columns of Crítica in
1933 and 1934. The irony of this is that “Streetcorner Man” really was
a story but that these sketches and several of the fictional pieces that
followed them, and which very slowly led me to legitimate stories,
were in the nature of hoaxes and pseudo-essays. 679
[I] had been rereading my Browning and knew from The Ring and the
Book that a story could be told from different points of view. Rosendo
Juárez, the seeming coward of the first version, might perhaps be
allowed to have his own say. So instead of the braggart of
“Streetcorner Man,” we get a Shavian character who sees through the
romantic nonsense and childish vanity of duelling, and finally attains
manhood and sanity. 682
In the first of these reckless compilations, there was a quite bad essay
on Sir Thomas Browne, which may have been the first ever attempted
on him in the Spanish language. There was another essay, which set
out to classify metaphors as though other poetic elements, such as
rhythm and music, could be safely ignored. There was a longish
essay on the non existence of the ego, cribbed from Bradley or the
Buddha or Macedonio Fernández. When I wrote these pieces, I was
trying to play the sedulous ape to two Spanish baroque seventeenth-
century writers, Quevedo and Saavedra Fajardo, who stood in their
own stiff, arid, Spanish way for the same kind of writing as Sir
Thomas Browne in “Urne-Buriall.”I was doing my best to write Latin in
Spanish, and the book collapses under the sheer weight of its
involutions and sententious judgements. The next of these failures
was a kind of reaction. I went to the other extreme - I tried to be as
Argentine as I could. I got hold of Segovia’s dictionary of Argentinisms
and worked in so many local words that many of my countrymen
could hardly understand it. Since I have mislaid the dictionary, I’m not
sure I would any longer understand the book myself, and so have
given it up as utterly hopeless. The third of these unmentionables
stands for a kind of partial redemption. I was creeping out of the
second book’s style and slowly back to sanity, to writing with some
attempt at logic and at making things easy for the reader... 684
No diré las fatigas de mi labor. Más de una vez grité a la bóveda que
era imposible descifrar aquel texto. Gradualmente, el enigma
concreto que me atareaba me inquietó menos que el enigma
genérico de una sentencia escrita por un dios. ¿Qué tipo de
sentencia (me pregunté) construirá una mente absoluta? 699
If Tzinacán can't clearly opt for the cogito it's only because his own
ontological security is guaranteed by the rigours of the quest. The
spotted pelt of the jaguar occupies his attention so completely that
253
Que muera conmigo el misterio que está escrito en los tigres. Quien
ha entrevisto el universo, quien ha entrevisto los ardientes designios
del universo, no puede pensar en un hombre, en sus triviales dichas
o desventuras, aunque ese hombre sea él. Ese hombre ha sido él y
ahora no le importa. 702
Conclusion:
Defining and Disciplining the Borgesian Text
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______________________________________
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Index
Terms relevant to the Glossary are in bold
A
absolute text, 157, 158
Acevedo de Borges, Leonor (Borges’mother) 24
Achilles (and tortoise) 23, 25, 226
Aeschylus (The Persians) 151
aesthetic, programme, 126, “error” and Ultraísta manifesto, 125; and
consumption, 105; and disjunctive syntagms, 142; and genre, 160;
and linguistics, 122; as anti-psychological, 53; as qualitative
judgement, 229; Borges’aesthetic programme, 125 ff; Crocean, 131;
its contradictory nature, 225 ff; Romantic, 110
Alazraki, Jaime 156,
aleph, El (Borges) 25, 26,
allegory, 231, 234 ff, and parody, 235
Amanecer (Borges) 44, 83 ff., 86 ff., 96
Amorosa anticipación (Borges) 99, 104
analogy, 15, 211, 213, 248, 253, 255, 262 ff., 271, 295, 298; and
Condillac, 258; and Derrida, 255; and misrecognition, 271 ff.; and
302
B
Barnstone, Willis 26
Barrio norte (Borges) 105
Barthelme, John 80
Barthes, Roland 76, 233, 300
Baudelaire, Charles Pierre 54
Baudrillard, Jean 284
Bell, Daniel (The Coming of Post-Industrial Society) 146
Bell-Villada, Gene 11, 53, 142, 177
Benarés (Borges) 95 ff., 104
Beowulf, 56
Bergson, Henri 23
Berkeley, Bishop John 23, 75, 7-84, 89, 94, 96, 109
Bhagavadgita, 155
Bible, 148, 156, 234
Biran, Maine de, 264 ff.
blindness, 72 ff., 274
Boedo-Florida controversy, 47, 151
book, 152, 154, 227 ff., and contract with fantasy, 227; and contractual
obligation, 274; as system of generative possibilities, 153; Fervor de
303
C
Calle con almacén rosado (Borges) 103
Calle desconocida (Borges) 96
Calles, Las (Borges) 34 ff., 40, 45, 91, 93, 94
Caminata (Borges) 78 ff., 80 ff., 87, 95, 100, 110
Campos atardecidos (Borges) 43, 86, 87
Carlyle, Thomas 107 ff.
Cartesian dualism, 109
Casi Juicio Final (Borges) 100
catalogue, 100, 154 ff., 220, 228 ff.
caudillos, 35 ff.
Cementerio de la Recoleta (Borges) 40, 48
Cercanías (Borges) 43, 77
Cervantes, 125, 129, 216, 229, 272, 283; and ‘Pierre Menard’, 283; as
unconscious author, 283
chessboard, 23, 25, 93 ff., 280
Chesterton, 188 ff., 272; contingent action in, 189; his influence on
Borges, 190; nightmare imagery, 209; teleology of his narratives, 189
childhood (Borges’) 12, 21 ff., 26, 29, 39, 43, 45, 47, 74 ff., 99, 107 ff.,
178, 207, 233; and memory, 46; and obsessive recollection, 25;
dissertation extracts key concerns from, 29; philosophy and Borges,
22 ff.
Christ, 96, 235
city, 40, 55, 78, 83, 95, 97, 101, 219, and impact of modernism, 80; as
Borges’landscape of imaginary reflection, 103; as Borges’ orientalist
fantasy, 95; as collective unity, 39; Borges’growing maturity towards,
100; Borges’love for Buenos Aires, 55; idealist maintenance of, 83
304
claims (in dissertation), 11 ff., 22, 29, 33, 74, 85, 107, 183, 229, 253,
278; Borges as verbal idealist, 15; Borges develops linguistic
approach after early poetry, 12; Borges’ artistic production shows
creative evolution, 11; Borges’ work shows pattern of metaphysical
reconciliations, 13; defense of ontological fallacy, 12; Fervor de
Buenos Aires can be read as a dialectic of poetic subjectification, 31;
four ontological problems fashion Borges’production, 22; structuralist
determination for Borges, 11; time and space used as indicators of
Borges’ ontological attitudes, 10; use of ‘action principle’ begins in
Borges’earliest works, 53 ff.
classics (and Borges) 24, 53, 55, 177 ff., 192, 198 ff., 200, 202, 283
cognition, operational, 51; alienating, 84; functional, 119; single act of,
130; 136, 175, symbolic elements in 176; range of expectations in,
191; transcription of values, 249; and functional lexia, 260
collateral, individualising 194; 198
Collectivity, 271, 277, repertory 284
conceptual object, emerges from cognition 136; management of 138;
Argentine idiom as, 144
concretization, and the epic, 136; and thought, 141; speculative plane of,
287
Condillac, Étienne 260 ff. critique of authorship, 263; analogy, 264;
Derrida’s critique of, 265; transferred conceptualisation, 265; rhetoric,
266; desire, 266; “analytic” 267, 269
Conrad, Joseph, 95
consciousness, Husserl and time-, 32; intervalic-, 34; retentive-, 35; folk-,
57; insomniacs and, 81; persistence of, 91; and time-, 94; Croce, 140;
as conceptual junkyard, 229; as creative force, 285; Berkeleian, 81;
facts as artefacts of, 161; recapitulatory, 280 ff.; textual, 232; the
Borgesian rose as imaginary object of, 215
contingency : philosophical 13; existential 42; historical 43, 98, 103; and
narrative, 104; and absolute, 156; of the Borgesian subject, 179;
criminal, 188; non-contingency of icons, 289
cosmopolitanism, and space, 78; Spanish, 150
Cover, John 80
criollo (and criollism) the Borges as, 24; dialects of, 122; Borges’
rejection of, 125; verbal substitutions, 150; in Martín Fierro, 197
Croce, Benedetto Borges’ critique of, 129; Borges’ functionalism
derives from, 131; and conceptual elementalism, 132 ff.; 139 ff., and
Todorov, 160; 162, “intuition” 227 ff.; critique of poetry as genre, 232,
270
305
Cuaderno de San Martín (Borges) 12, 57, 70, Borges explores narrative
verse in, 105, 120, 282, 301
Cualquier sepulcro (Borges) 48
culture, and analysis (Sarlo), 11; 12; Borges’ cultural resources, 22;
fragmented, 24 ff.; analysis of, 77; Argentina, 78; critical-, 84; values,
119; lexic resources, 121; resistant and collusive, 122; values, 136;
regulation, 145; Wilkins’ inceptive critique 147; politics, 149 ff.; 150,
imagery in, 153; myopia, 192; resources, 199; disjuncture, 200; self-
recognition in, 214; seduction, 226; authenticity, 227; transferred
cultural imagery, 231; transcriptive values, 249
Curso de los recuerdos (Borges) 105
D
Davidson, Donald 131
defamiliarisation , Metaphoric 126; oxymoron, 135; and narrative
interruption, 142; 299
deferral, critique of, 255; 257, and Borges, 269 ff.
demiurge, as mediator between God and man, 72, as Borgesian
compromise 82; capricious, 85; women as, 97; 100, language as,
121;
Der Golem (Meyrink) 94
Derrida, Jacques 174, 248, critique of analogy, 253 ff.; and différance
254; intentional writing, 255; insistent monologue, 257; author-
presence, 258; 259, 261, and good writing? 261; retracing and
resupplying, 262; authorship, 263; critique of analogy, 264; and
repetition, 265; “frivolity” 266; scientific? 267; différance trapped, 269;
Derrida and Saussure contrasted, 273 ff.; “colonial” subjects in, 274
ff.; 285
Descartes, René, demolition of Aristotle’s vegetative soul 263;
despedida, Una (Borges) 98,
destiny, history as 56; agents of, 250;
dialect, lunfardo, 149; its use as local colour, 197;
dialectic, of contradictory philosophical contingencies in Borges, 13; 19,
of poetic subjectification, 33; work of art is primarily dialectic rather
than mimetic 192; symbolically homogeneous, 193; ‘El milagro
secreto’as quasi-dialectic, 289;
dictionary, semantic links, 92; variance of lexical resources, 148;
restrictive authority of, 150; generation of lexical combinations, 250;
Segovia’s dictionary of Argentinisms, 283;
306
E
economy, of propositional value, 36; a negative economy of
transmutation, 75; feudal: ontological, 101; association and excess,
128; inadequacies of economic analysis, 151; symbolic economy ,
221; of defigured ‘logic’ , 258; of present absence, 259; negative
economy of signification, 262; and repetition , 264; as extrageneric
consideration, 273; of representation, 283;
Eduardo Wilde (Borges) 139
ego, ego-less subject, 80; labour of subjectification, 81; vagabond I of
the Freudians, 127; Borges uses general psychologistic assumptions,
128; 283,
Ejercicio de análisis (Borges) 123, 128
El libro de arena (Borges) 134
Elégia de los Portones (Borges) 104,
emblem, life of emblems conditioning Borges’ mature production, 30;
53, emblematic presence, 56; emblematic persona, 57; repertoire
of fictive emblems, 72; 75, in the Borgesian narrative there is only
minimal interaction between the emblem and the actions of the
characters, 76; we decipher the text as the vehicle for the operation of
the emblem as such, 77; action in narrative as the ordered sequence
307
F
fallacy, ontological, 13, 99, 101; historical, 101, 103, 104
fantastic, and magic realism, 11; fantastic realism, 139; and hesitation
effect, 141; pragmatics of, 161; motivation, 175; symbolic
participation, 180; shock effect, 184; as superior species of narrative,
185; narrative condensation, 187; 210, film imagery, 212; and power
of Metaphor, 232; modalising fictionality and, 284
Faulkner, William 24
Fernández, Macedonio 55, 283
Fervor de Buenos Aires (Borges) Chapter 1 passim; visuality in, 73;
intimacy, 77; geometry in, 84, 91; proto-labyrinth 86; suspension of
Time in, 94; Super-Objective Time in, 100; shifting poetic concerns,
120; Borges claims originary affection for, 280;
ficción, as conceptual unity, 139; Borgesian, 277; and early narrative,
281; disquotational effects in, 283; its failed reconciliation, 300
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 109
308
films (and film imagery) 15, condensation as analogue to fiction, 189 ff.;
reception of film imagery constructs a parallel argument to Borges’
understanding of the reception of narrative objects, 214; framing of
filmic narrative and the production of symbol, 219 ff.; as imagically
primitive, 221 ff.; plasticity and reality in film, 223 ff.; failure of
symbolic identification in, 225;
Final de año (Borges) 94
Finnegans Wake (Joyce) 152
Flaminius Rufus (character in Borges) 39
Flaubert, Gustave 122, 119
formal motivation, 52 ff.
formal postponement, 137, 301
Formula consensus helvética, 156
Foucault, Michel 146, 229
France, 84, 202, 204
Frederick the Great(Carlyle) 109
French language 12, 24, and literature, 54 ff., lexical resources, 148 ff.
Freud, Sigmund (and Freudian analysis) 14, 216; 75, Borges contra ego-
psychology, 127, 210; literary, 224; 273, 276, 299
Funes el memorioso (Borges) 26, 32, 74
G
Garden of Forking Paths, The (Borges) 23, 190
gaucho, and urban space, 78; Borges’ early influences, 178; 139,
emblem of, 191 ff.; 195, narrative and consumption, 196; 197, 198,
199
General Quiroga va en coche al muere, El (Borges) 100, 106
Generation of 1898, 22
genetic (thesis) 19, 21, causal, 56 ff.; 75, 93, 122, 124, 142, 261
Geneva, 44, 53, 74, 93, 109
genre, and conceptual functionality, 14; and universality, 198; art works
inhabit a limbo of categorical indeterminacy, 195; as captive of
description, 161; as meta-symbolic (qv. Saussure, Derrida, 248;
Borges’ critique of, 195; Borges’ experiments, 84; contradiction of
repetition, 251; discussion of verse collections, 98; parodic forms,
233; seeing’genre inevitably traps us within literariness, 235; Todorov
and Croce, 160; Todorov’s problematisation, 161
geometry, 57, 72, 74, 78, 85, 91, 93, 94, 261, 262
German language 94, 109, 110, 123, 126, 208, 218, 284
gnostics, 83, 94, 95, 121
309
God, as perceptor, 35 ff.; and the self, 41; TimeGod, 53, 71;
ambivalence of in Borges, 94 ff.; a study in conflictive character, 96;
as abstraction, 99; metaphysical economy, 161; and German
idealism, 108; the god of Borges, 118; in Bishop Wilkins’cosmology,
147 ff.; and writing, 156 ff.; Qaholom, 285 ff.; Hladík and, 289 ff.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 118, 189
Gómez de la Serna, 22, 200
Góngora, Luis de 55, 122, 152, inventories in, 154; alienating profusion,
220 ff.; 228 ff., 232
Grammatical time, 20, 34
Guaraní (language) 149
H
Hacedor, El (Borges) 105
Haslam, Fanny (Borges’grandmother) 24
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 24
Heidegger, Martin, and “experience,” 285; kreuzweise Durchstreichung,
259
Heir, 271, 277
Heraclitus 155
Hernández, José 78, 125, 192, 196 ff., 199
hesitation effect 141 ff., 284
Himno del mar (Borges) 151
hispanophone, 22, 141
Historia de la noche (Borges) 134
Hobbes, Thomas 26
Holy Scripture, 156 ff.
Hombre de la esquina rosada (Borges) 108, 178
Homer, 39, epithet in, 123; 151 ff., 226
Horizonte de un suburb (Borges) 104
House of Asterion, The (Borges) 56
hrönir (idealistically produced objects on Tlön) 80
Human Comedy, The (Saroyan) 24
Hume, David 109, 259
Husserl, Edmund 32, 255, 257 ff.
Hylas, (character in Berkeley’s Three Dialogues) 81
I
iconographic complex, 221
310
idealism, verbal, 15, 123, 214 ff.; (RSI) 79 ff., 98, German, 108 ff.,
Wilkins and, 145 ff.
identity, (poetic) Chs. 1 & 2, passim
Idioma analítico de John Wilkins, El (Borges) 146
Idioma de los argentinos, El (Borges) 84, 108, 120, 127, 139, 145, 148,
178, 282
Idioma infinito, El (Borges) 121, 125
Iliad (Homer) 39, 148, 151, 205, 213, 271
image, eidetic 26; childhood, 46 ff.; duplication, 74; interstitial, 85 ff.,
streets as, 77; whiteness, 139; conjunction of, 150 ff.; culturally-
bound, 155 ff.; Centaur as, 181 ff.; recurrence, 183, 187, 192;
contagion, 202; kenning, 206 ff.; Croce, 228 ff.
imaginary causality , 53, 142
Immortal, The (Borges) 23, 39, 50, 282 ff.
implausibility of motion 23, 39, 48
implication, 85
Indagación de la palabra (Borges) 127 ff.; 137 ff.
India, 95, 290
Inquisiciones (Borges) 120, 128, 282
Inscripción (Borges) 50
insomnia, 25 ff., 81 ff., 85 ff., 92
intention, and ‘intentional’ psychology, 128; and Derridean critique, 250
ff.; and grammatically in Borges, 135; Borges’ equivocality of, 281;
Borges’ intentions as author, 15; lexicality determines intentionality,
92; words as little parcels of intention, 135
interpretation, problems of phenomenological, 33, monologic, 44,
psychological, 75, 142
intimate space, 41, 71, 78
intuition, analogy as, 210, Croce and, 227 ff.; 270
Islam, 156
J
Jactancia de quietud (Borges) 104
James, William 230
Johnson, Samuel 101
Jorge Guillermo, (Borges’father) 22 ff.
Jorge Luis Borges: Writer on the Edge (Sarlo) 11, 77
Jung, Carl Gustav 123, 159
311
K
Kafka, Franz 145
Kant, Immanuel 109, 110
Keats, John 122
kenning, 150, 204 ff.
Kenningar, Las (Borges) 150, 204, 215
Kipling, Rudyard 104, 197
Kuhn, Thomas 161
Kurtz (character in Heart of Darkness) 95
L
labyrinth, 15, labyrinthine narrative, 23; absence of, 29; 38, proto-
labyrinth, 86; as emblem, 280; Hladík’s, 298; 303
Lacan, Jacques 128
language, 14, 15, functionality of, 19; multilingualism in Borges’ family,
24; recall through, 28; 32, on Tlön, 79; German philosophical, 109;
fashions existence, 120 ff.; adjectives and, 123; logical relations
within, 124; pretension in, 125; symbolic transmission in, 126;
Metaphors, 127; concepts in, 128; associative regimen in, 129; Latin,
130; and learnability, 131; redundancy of, 132; apprehension of, 135;
fecundity of, 136; Croce, 140; sequential apprehension, 141 ff.;
syntax, 143; Wilkins, 145; internal conceptual apparatus, 146 ff.; in
the epic, 148; relative Metaphoricity between, 149 ff.; as junkyard,
150; and genre, 162; Todorov, 174; Ultraism and, 191; localised, 197;
fecundity of Germanic, 209 ff.; Metaphoricity of everyday language,
233; permutations in English, 251; Rousseau and, 255; Saussure,
259; social model of, 264; irreducibility of, 269; as its own
mythological process, 270; as social act, 272; exchange relations
within, 273
Leaves of Grass (Whitman) 151, 158
Lenguaje como fenómeno estético, El (Montolíu) 132
libraries, Borges’ fathers’, 24; as place of concealment, 25; Borges’
directorship of Argentine National, 74; 139, of Babel, 146, 290
Life and Death of Jason, The (William Morris) 180, 196, 217
Life of Cowley (Johnson) 101
linguistic memory, 28
Llaneza (Borges) 105
locative, (preposition) 124
Locke, John 109, 261
312
logic, inconsistencies, 13; 14, 15, 22, homoeopathic, 23; problems, 25;
26, word use and, 32 ff.; 38, 41, 42, 43 ff., 53, 79, 82, 85, 92, 101,
language, 124; 130, Montolíu, 132; 137, Wilkins, 146; 149, 157 ff.,
coherence, 161; Borges’ logic of pragmatic reception, 195; Freud,
210; 216, 227 ff., 234, deconstructive, 254 ff.; “scientific” 257; and
series, 258; Logic (Condillac) 263 ff.; morality, 274; 283
Lord Jim (Conrad) 95
Lottery in Babylon, The (Borges) 146
Lucretius 43
Lugones, Leopoldo 55, 192, 202, 216
Luna de enfrente (Borges) 13, 69, 70, as liberation from earlier
concerns, 97 ff.; as intertext, 98; 99, 100, new vision of Buenos Aires,
103 ff.; 120 ff; 282, 301
lunfardo (dialect) 199, 203
M
Madrid, 22, 151, 200
magic causality , 11, active principle, 12; 15, 38, 44 ff., lucid and limited,
76; 129, 134, 139, as imaginary causality ? 142; 176 ff.; 183,
extended, 185 ff.; 191 ff., as verbal idealism, 215 ff., 219, 248, 279,
302
Mallarmé, Stèphane, suggestiveness of language, 53 ff.; 134, 152, 154,
179, 184, 203
Martín Fierro (Hernández) 78, 105, universality of, 125; 192, 196, lack of
local colour, 197; 198 ff.; as epic? 199; 203
Martín Fierro (journal) 151, 178, 282
materialism, 11, 14, 141, 147, 158, 303
Mauthner, Fritz 148
Melville, Herman, Leonor Borges translates, 24; 142, 180, “whiteness”
in, 184, 209
Metaphor, 11 ff., 14, cliché, 32; “time” as 35; conservational in Borges,
43 ff; 47, relations, 51 ff.; governing, 54 ff.; paucity and generative
capacity of languages, 56; and blindness? 73; presentational in
Borges, 79; interstitial and enfolding, 85 ff.; misrecollected, 134 ff.;
kenning, 124, 204 ff.; as verbal relations, 127 ff.; polyvalence of, 137
ff; socially conditioned, 145, Wilkins and, 147; 150, Whitman, 153 ff.;
191, Ultraism, 202; shock effect, 209 ff; transcription of, 213;
idealisation, 215; repetition, 230; and post-poetics, 231 ff.; syntactic
residua, 233 ff.; resource logistics of, 250; and différance, 254;
313
Condillac, 261 ff.; geometry as, 266; Saussure and, 269 ff.; sociality
of, 270 ff.; 274, 299
Meyrink, Gustav 94
Mi vida entera (Borges) 101
Milagro secreto, El (Borges) 23, 25, 44, 286, 289
Millán, Elsa Astete (Borges’first wife) 99
milonga, 105, as euphemism, 150
mimesis, poetic, 95; ritual, 216
mirror, as image, 29; as captor of phenomenality, 47 ff.; 70, fear of, 74
ff.; implicatory, 85, 275, as emblem, 280
misrecognition, analogic, 271 ff.; 276 ff.
Moby Dick(Melville) 142, 180, 187, 209
modal description, 137, 301
modality, “time”as, 41; inter-subjective, 73; doubt as, 298; 301
modernism, as machine, 78; classical, 203
Montevideo (Borges) 104
Montolíu, Manuel de 129, 132
Morris, William 175 ff.; 180 ff.; 195, 196, 217 ff.
motivation, formal, 52 ff.; 55, 154, magic causality and, 176 ff.;
absurdity of, 180; 188, Medea and 196; character, 216, 233; 300
myth, Grendel, 56; 108, “great” myth is beyond morality, 288
mythopoesis, 104, 108
N
Narrative Art and Magic (Borges) 54, 180, 183, 213
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The (Poe) 53, 139, 180, 184
narrative 11 ff.; incorporative, 14; expanding, 23; Borges reworks, 29;
poetic, 31; 44, Mallarmé and, 54; surface and submerged, 55, 185 ff.;
symbol and emblem, 75 ff.; contingent, 104 ff.; lyric and intellectual
combined in Borges, 108; autonomous, 121; action in, 136 ff.;
hesitation in, 142; rearrangement of narrative elements in, 154;
reproduction, 176; narrative objects, 178 ff., 181 ff.; condensation in,
189 ff.; 204, problems of assignment, 250 ff., and Ch. 5 passim
Nietzsche, Friedrich 273
nightmare, 156, 209, 227
Nirvana, 81
non-psychologistic narrative, verbal causality in, 12; Condillac’s senso-
conceptual inductivism as, 260
North America, 84
Note on Walt Whitman (Borges) 152
314
O
Objective Space, 71
Objective Time, 20, 34 ff.
Odyssey (see Homer)
ontological fallacy (see fallacy)
orientalisation, 95
Otras Inquisiciones (Borges) 84
Otro Whitman, El (Borges) 151
P
Palermo (Northern area of Buenos Aires 108
Para las seis cuerdas (Borges) 105
paradigm, 92, reality-fantasy, 142; interpretative, 156; hero as, 247;
genre, 251, 277; 300
Paraguay, (see Barthelme)
parallelism, as foregrounding in narrative, 179
Paredes, Nicolas 108
Parmenides 43
Parnassians, 53 ff. 179
parody, self-, 222; ironic, 226; failure of, 227; Cervantes and, 235;
Derrida, 269; quotational, 283, of vigil for the dead, 179
Paseo de julio, El (Borges) 105
personal identity, Borges’22 ff.; dislocated, 24; management of, 39; 45,
“time” and, 52 ff.
Peter Snook (Poe) 142
phenomena, time as, 20 ff.; mental, 33 ff.; everyday life, 42;
uncontrollable, 49; English versus Spanish, 144 ff.; 146,
recapitulatory, 287
Philonous (see Hylas)
Plaza de San Martín, La (Borges) 43, 77, 86, 91, 93 ff.
Poe, Edgar Allan 54, 175, “whiteness”in, 183 ff.
poetics, causal, 12; recapitulatory, 55, 77; revoicing, 108; Aristotle, 154;
condensation, 187; 191, 196, magically causal, 224; and post-poetics,
231 ff.; reincorporation, 268, 279, 302
porteño (also portone, inhabitant of the original port area of Buenos
Aires) 125
315
Q
Quasi-Personal Objectivity , 20, 32, 39
Quasi-Personal Time , 45, 56, 71
Quevedo, y Villegas, Francisco Gómez de 122, 216, 283
Quine, W. V. 131
Quran, 156
R
Racine, Jean Baptiste 149
Radical Objective Identification (ROI) 219 ff; 248
Radical Subjective Idealism (RSI) 79 ff.
reading, 11, 12, dissertation’s reading of Borges, 13 ff.; propositional
complexes, 52; recursivity in, 74; problems with critical, 92; syntactic
operation in, 139 ff.; hesitation, 141 ff.; enlisting the reader, 180, ff.;
disturbances to, 184; collaborative, 192; 200, 203, dead authorised,
213; Don Quijote, 235; 248, Derrida and, 253 ff.; alternative, 264; 274,
counter-readings, 286 ff.; 299
realism, magic causality not magical realism, 12; indispensable for
fantasy, 139 ff.; Borges’opposition to, 176 ff.; 193, 210, 232, 302
realist novel, 178
Recoleta, La (Borges) 40 ff.; 44, 48
regionalism, Borges’objections to literary, 149 ff.
remanso (motif in Borges) 43 ff.; 93
richness (semantic richness of language indicative of decay) 150 ff.
rival, 270 ff.; usurpation, 277
Rosa, La (Borges) 212
Rosas (Borges) 35, 56 ff.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 118, 255, 265, 269, 275
Rubén, Darío 122, 202
Russell, Bertrand 124, 131, 207
316
S
Saint Augustine 123
Saint Paul, 74
Saussure, Ferdinand de 15, 138, 141, and Derrida, 248; 255, 257 ff.;
Metaphor, 269 ff.; “play with a cats of three” 271 ff.; Generic
Incorporation, 272; misrecognition, 276 ff,; 299
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm 109
Schopenhauer, Arthur: ego-less subject, 80 ff.
Scriptures, 154
Searle, John 131
Secret Miracle, The (see El milagro secreto)
Sentirse en muerte (Borges) 84
Seville, 151
Shakespeare, William 126, 149, 152, 193, 212, 226, 236,
signification, 34, 119 ff.; metatheory of, 137; generative, 146; 157, 160,
174, hidden, 191; atomic, 207; horizontal, 214; negative, 234; chain
of, 261; negative economy of, 262; 266, 269, 270, 273, 302
simulacra, 42, 206, 284
solipsism, 79
Spiller, Gustav 126, 202
Stabb, Martin 43, 284
structuralism, 15, Borges between structuralism and post-structuralism,
231; 249, 253, 254, self-dialogue, 269; Derrida and, 274; Borges as
microcosm of, 299; 300
Sturluson, Snorri 124, 208, 210
subject, 11 ff., and the mythical in the kenning, 205 ff.; Borges modifies
his subjectivity in early verse volumes, 13; contingency of the
Borgesian narrative subject, 181; Diagram 5 illustrates levels of
subjectivity in Fervor de Buenos Aires, 37; history as major subject in
Luna de enfrente, 100 ff.; human subject as product and producer of
linguistic relations, 120 ff.; human subjectivity constituted by
grammatical relations, 127; psychology of the subject in narrative, 248
ff.; Rosas as trans-historical subject, 56; subject-position determined
by functionality of language, 140 ff.; Tlön as deconstruction of the
subject, 80; Vidor’s use of oblique subjectivity in film influences
Borgesian fiction, 223; Wilkins and the indissolubility of human and
divine elements in the subject, 146; subject ego-less in Berkeley and
Schopenhauer, 81
suburb, as collective unity, 40 ff.; 103, 108
317
Super-Objective Space , 71
Super-Objective Time , 20, 32, 34 ff.; 39 ff.; 53, 100, 103
supplement, 254, 266
Surrealistas, 151
symbol, as imagic expenditure, 186; Diagram 7, 76; discussion of
generic and specific protagonistic symbolisation, 195; El gaucho
Martín Fierro as storehouse of symbol for Argentine literature, 194;
production of symbol in Borges, 193 ff.; woman as symbol of affective
displacement in Borges, 101
symbolic complex , 215, 247, 248, 302
symbolic reproduction, 176, study of Pym as, 183 ff.; “star quality” and,
185; 188, 192, the gaucho and, 193 ff.
syntax, as world structuration, 136 ff., 142 ff.; conceptual hesitancy, 143
ff.
T
Tamaño de mi esperanza (Borges) 120, 121, 126, 282
teleological contradiction, 147
textual object, discovery of, 139 ff.; poems as, 158; hero as, 226 ff.; 236,
301 ff.
The South (Borges) 54
Three Dialogues of Philonous and Hylas (see Berkeley)
thulir, 150, 205, 207
TimeSpace, 71
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (Borges) 75, 79
Todorov, Tzvetan 153, 141 ff.; 160 ff.; 174
Tolstoy, Leo 152, 177
translation, progressive decay of, 285
Truco, El (and truco) 41, mathematicality, 42; unlimited contingency ,
43; ritual of the truco-players, 44, 46, 78, 84, 93, as analogue 94
U
Ultimo sol en Villa Ortúzar (Borges) 100
Ultraism, 14, 22, 41, Borges’ divergence from, 87; 98, 120, 123, and
linguistics, 125, 127, 151; divisions within, 200 ff.; Borges’ manifesto
for, 204; 207, 233 ff.; 299, 301
Unamuno y Jugo, Miguel de 55, 200
Universal Baseball Association, The (See Cover)
Universal History of Infamy, A (Borges) 281
universal history, 49, 198, 250
318
V
Valéry, Paul 22
verbal idealism, 123, 214 ff.
Verlaine, Paul 106
Versos de catorce (Borges) 100
Vindicación de la Cábala (Borges) 156
W
whiteness (magically causal emblem in Borges) 139, 175, 180, 133 ff.
Whitman, Walt (See Leaves of Grass)
Wilkins, Bishop John 145 ff.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 131
Woolf, Virginia 24
work of art, failures of, 105, 195; and incorporation, 218; as system of
generative possibilities, 154; Borges and the ordered recurrence of
imagery, 183; dubbing as the implicit rejection of the art work, 226;
magic causality as determination of governing Metaphor, 54;
mediates between history and story, 199; primarily dialectic rather
than mimetic, 192; the Borgesian work of art obeys causal laws, 176;
the work of art presents conceptual objects, 139; universalism and
particularity, 199
World as Will and Representation, The (See Schopenhauer)
writing, and Lévi-Strauss, 274; and repression, 258; Borges adamant
there is no new writing, 225; Borges and the new writing, 200; Borges
comments on being changed by his writing, 145; Borges comments
on his earlier “unmentionable” writing, 283; Condillac and good
(analytical) versus bad (Metaphorical) writing, 261; Condillac versus
Maine de Biran, 264; contradictory character of sacred writing, 158 ff.;
Derrida and the double-cross of writing, 285; dissertation claims
resolution of philosophical contradiction must be resolved within the
writing process, 13; grammar and expectation, 259; grammar and
intention, 255; impassable gap between writing and experience in “El
milagro secreto”, 286; intellectualising as recognising writing per se,
162; logical perfection of sacred writing, 158; Naomi Lindstrom
comments on writing as interference of alternative selves, 284;
paradox of paralogism
Y
Year of Meteors (Whitman) 155
319
Yeats, W. B. 192
Z
Zahir, El (Borges) 25, 26, 284
Zeno of Elea 23, 25, 75, 84, 93
320
321
Endnotes to Glossary
place, and is thus circular. René Wellek and Austin Warren 1963:
Theory of Literature p. 183. As for Borges’avowedly nominalistic
stance, both in the study of philosophy (See Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius) and literature, there is evidence that he was continually
working to infiltrate his later ficciones from a position he had inherited
from Fritz Mauthner’s views on the primacy of content-elements in
language to construct the reader’s world. Borges himself refers off-
handedly to Mauthner’s Kritik der Sprache in ‘El idioma analítico de
John Wilkins’, p. 707.
2
Tzvetan Todorov 1975: The Fantastic: A Structuralist Approach to a
Literary Genre, p. 110.
3
‘In most literary texts, however, the sequence of sentences is so
structured that the correlates serve to modify and even frustrate the
expectations they have aroused.’Wolfgang Iser 1978: The Act of
Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, p. 111. See also Northrop
Frye 1963: ‘Myth, Fiction, and Displacement’in Fables of Identity:
Studies in Poetic Mythology, p. 26.
4
See René Wellek and Austin Warren 1963: Theory of Literature pp.
182-3.
5
Aristotle 1965: On the Art of Poetry in Aristotle, Horace, Longinus:
Classical Literary Criticism. p. 65.
6
See Wolfgang Iser 1978: The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic
Response, pp. 13-7; Mikel Dufrenne 1973: The Phenomenology of
Aesthetic Experience, p. 345.
7
See Milton K. Munitz 1974: Existence and Logic, p. 6.
Endnotes to Introduction
8
Among recent Spanish studies I can only applaud the ingenuity of
Albert Julián Pérez’s 1986 Bakhtinian critique, Poética de la prosa de
J. L. Borges, a study that also deserves emulation, especially in the
light of other recent continental semioticians and philosophers, a line
followed in Michel Lafon’s 1990 post-structuralist engagement, Borges
ou la réécriture.
9
But this is not to say that I have adopted the rather imaginative way of
dealing with time and space followed by Bachelard, Poulet or Lefebvre.
For this analysis time and space exist as words that Borges can only
use in certain ways. Their connotative value is thus not as important as
their denotative functionality, which I argue is crucial for my reading. If
323
a handbook that Borges’father used as the basis for his own teaching.
As for Borges’introduction to philosophy, his mother recounts that it
began as early as the age of ten: ‘Pour cette dernière discipline, il lisait
beaucoup et il parlait avec son père, car mon mari, tout en étant
avocat, faisait un cours sur la psychologie anglaise à l’Institut des
Langues vivantes; tous deux commencèrent à parler philosophie
quand Georgie avait dix ans.’Propos de Mmme. Leonor Acevedo de
Borges. In L’Herne, 1964, p. 11.
23
Persistence and duplication? Since duplication guarantees the
persistence of identity I have opted to cite both phenomena as
evidence of an entity’s continuation.
24
This theme is also expressed in Borges’reflections on the role of the
fictional Don Quijote in the novel Don Quijote. See Debra A. Castillo
1984: The Translated World: A Postmodern Tour of Libraries in
Literature, pp. 76.
25
See Rawdon R. Wilson 1990: In Palamedes’Shadow: Explorations
in Play, Game, and Narrative Theory, p. 204. Peter Hutchinson
comments that the Borgesian detective story actually allows its reader
more scope for writerly consumption due to its metaphysical level. See
Peter Hutchinson 1983: Games Authors Play, p. 24. One could make
similar claims for Chesterton’s Father Brown series, if morality is
allowed to substitute for metaphysicality.
26
See Jerome Klinkowitz 1981: The Novel as Artifact: Spatial Form in
Contemporary Fiction, p. 39. For a way in which this ramification is
developed as a series of links in a narrative chain, see Seymour
Chatman 1990: Story and Narrative. In Dennis Walder (ed) 1990:
Literature in the Modern World, pp. 113-4.
329
"Kernel" Madden 1
Unfollowed Narrative
Paths
2
"Satellites" ? Ts'ui Pên
Direction of Story 3
German agent
Anticipatory or
Retrospective
Story Lines
?
Henri Bergson, whom Borges probably first read during his enforced
sojourn in Geneva during World War I, describes the Eleatics’paradox
in terms of a confusion between the words motion and space: motion is
actually a linguistic compound involving both physical movement and
the space that is traversed within that movement ( Time and Free Will,
pp. 112-113). Thus, in using the sentence “Achilles moves twice as far
as the tortoise” we are actually expressing two thoughts: “Achilles
moves and the tortoise moves in the same instant” and “The space the
tortoise moves in the same instant as Achilles moves is twice that of
his rival”. This converts the concept of time into its spatial homologue -
time cannot be seen as detached from space.
30
See James’comments on the difference between ‘reproductive
memory’and the successive recollection of events in William James
1910: Psychology. London: Macmillan and Co, Chapters XVII (‘The
Sense of Time’), and XVIII (‘Memory’), pp. 286, 287-8. In ‘Funes the
Memorius’Borges was to describe an extreme case of psychotic
remembrance that probably has its origin in Bergson’s description of
involuntary memory: ‘A human being who should dream his life
instead of living it would no doubt thus keep before his eyes at each
moment the infinite multitude of the details of his past history. And, on
the other hand, the man who should repudiate this memory with all that
it begets would be continually acting his life instead of truly
representing it to himself: a conscious automaton, he would follow the
lead of useful habits which prolong into an appropriate reaction the
stimulation received.’Henri Bergson 1911 [Eighth impression 1970]:
Matter and Memory, p. 201. It is obvious, if Borges heard this passage
at any time, that his father’s dilemma became a powerful influence on
his own life conditioning his artistic expression. ‘Funes’it will be
remembered, while initially exulting in his newfound ability as
Bergson’s dreamer, eventually sickens of it, and longs for the peace of
the automaton.
31
Borges in ‘An Autobiographical Essay’, 1971, p. 207. Also see
Richard Burgin 1969, p. 27. See also Borges at Eighty: Conversations,
1982, p. 157.
32
As Norman Nicholson remarks on William Saroyan, his vision is one
of Eden rather than earth, and his tales are biblical rather than
terrestrial. In a similar way Borges’stories are attempts to supplant the
mundanity of everyday life by recourse to philosophical devices, as in
stories like Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, where an idealist universe
331
impinges on, and then supplants, its materialist rival. See Norman
Nicholson 1944: Man and Literature, pp. 140-141.
33
What little we have of Leonor, we have through second-hand
accounts and passing references. As Tillie Olsen notes, quoting
Virginia Woolf, when one hears of a famous male writer, it is well to
look for a woman, often a mother, behind the pen. As Borges’father
was also a writer, and the young Jorge was surrounded by a vast
library in several languages, Olsen’s implication is perhaps a little
overstated. See Tillie Olsen, 1965: Silences, pp. 219 n. 220. Obviously
his mother’s activity as a translator influenced Borges’own efforts. As
Victoria Ocampo relates Borges, during 1936-7, published Spanish
versions of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Orlando; in 1941
Henri Michaux’s Un barbare en Asie; in 1944 Faulkner’s Wild Palms
and André Gide’s Perséphone. See Victoria Ocampo 1964: Visions de
Jorge Luis Borges. In L’Herne, 1964, p. 22. The link to Michaux, an
author whose narrative technique resembles and precedes Borges’
own, is intriguing. As Eberhard Geisler points out, Borges became
personally acquainted with the novelist in 1936 when he visited
Buenos Aires to attend an international congress of the PEN
organisation. El otro de Borges, Michaux. In Blüher, Karl Alfred and
Toro, Alfonso de (eds.) 1995, pp. 113-4.
34
As Henri Bergson, whom Borges read as a teenager in Geneva
remarks, just as the self is constituted through language, it is also
fragmented by it, becoming, when we choose to examine it, a
succession of selves all melting into each other depending on the
social conditions into which we intrude. Henri Bergson 1910 [Eighth
impression 1971]: Time and Free Will, p. 128.
35
See Jaime Alazraki 1988: Borges and the Kabbalah, p. 55.
36
As Richard Ohmann implies, one of the characteristics that has
determined Borges’theoretical reception as a “postmodern”is the
incorporation of this appropriation as an illocutionary disjunction in his
ficciones. See Richard M. Ohmann 1971: Speech, Action, and Style, p.
252.
37
Borges later succinctly illustrated this tension in the 1964 volume of
poems El otro, el mismo (The Other, The Same) whose principle
theme as its title suggests, is the historical reproduction of identity. Is
anything other than an historicist view possible? As Stanley Fish notes,
quoting Richard Rorty, any theory that seeks to explain any part of the
real world involves one’s apprehension of the before and after of the
332
43
Take the example, commonly heard amongst Australian teenagers,
of ‘Spak!’generally meaning ‘I am soundly perplexed by your remark.’
No amount of questioning will elicit anything but the vaguest of
definitions, and even mounting hostility as the interviewee begins to
realise the unsteady ground upon which he or she uses the term.
44
Borges at Eighty: Conversations, p. 24.
45
Richard Burgin, pp. 28-29. I do not renounce the mind readers’
gaudy turban, and even employ some of their biographical chicanery.
But then, without some attempt at speculative biography, one might as
well be writing technical manuals or cookbooks. As for my justification,
it’s very slim indeed, resting on Borges’mention of an eponymous
prose outline for Fervor de Buenos Aires (‘Advertencias’p. 172) in
1921 that supplies some evidence, dealing as it does with the themes
of philosophical fatalism, the squat, menace of the suburbs, and the
eerie geometry of the plazas of Buenos Aires, for his views. See
‘Buenos Aires’ in Inquisiciones, pp. 87-91.
46
One may note a similarity with what Tzvetan Todorov calls ‘the
grammarians’debate’over Mallarmé’s syntax. What part does the
focus of the exegesis have in determining a critical ‘product’? Where
Paul Bénichou seeks to explain ‘the profound motivations of
Mallarmé’s obscurity’by arriving at the view that ‘the strange structure
of the sonnet confirms, in a way, the metaphysics that the sonnet
professes (Bénichou quoted in Todorov, 1988, p. 127), my own project
is devoted first to the demarcation between the grammatical use and
poetic use of words in Borges, and then to the combination of the
grammatical and poetic modes in analysing their interplay as a
possible expression of the symbolic regimen that generates his familiar
repertoire in later works. See Tzvetan Todorov 1990a, pp. 126-127. As
for the question of just what kind of narrative a poem may be, and thus
what rules may be applied to its interpretation, I tend to agree with
Samuel R. Levin’s conclusion that if the reader accepts the world which
the poem itself describes (including of course its Metaphoric
ascriptions) then he or she is bound to accept the poem as a
performative utterance implying that world. See Samuel R. Levin 1976:
‘Concerning What kind of Speech Act a Poem Is’in Teun A. Van Dijk
(ed) 1976, pp. 141-160, particularly 153.
47
As Antonio Planells demonstrates, the symbol of the labyrinth is a
culminative image, the development of Borges’literary production that
335
imagine any belief that he or she has held which has not determined a
concern operating now. If the reader answers that belief in the Easter
Bunny is a case of non-persistent belief I would agree, but the reader
would be hard-pressed to deny that the belief in a benevolent and
fictitious rabbit which existed for the child, and which has been
subsequently shown to be false by experience and experiment for the
adult, does not still involve a persistent concern centering on the role of
the mythical in a child’s experience, and the dissolution of the fantastic
as an element of character development.
63
Although they may ‘condition’the later works this is not to say that
their presence will always be detectable. These “themes”are
provisional guesses at what might constitute a basic structure for
Borges’later ficciones, and thus serve as dispensable markers which
the dissertation is meant to elaborate and transcend.
64
Time is a ‘motif’because it occurs as one constituent of each of the
four ‘themes’, other motifs being space, god, woman, death, the city of
Buenos Aires, etc. These themes make up the ‘main theme’of
ontological unease, or the uncertainty of being, which underlie the
totality of Borges’artistic production.
65
Borges, 1974, pp. 543-4. For a putative exorcism of time-worn
existence see ‘La busca de Averroes’, ibid, p. 588, ‘Sentí, en la última
página, que mi narración era un simbolo del hombre que yo fuí,
mientras la escribía y que, para redactar esa narración, yo tuve que
ser aquel hombre y que, para ser aquel hombre, yo tuve que redactar
esa narración, y así hasta lo infinito.’
66
Borges, ibid, p. 17. Cf. Later Borges would eulogise the pampa as
well as the city as ‘[D]os presencias de Dios, dos realidades de tan
segura eficacia reverencial que la sola enunciación se sus nombres
basta para ensanchar cualquier verso y nos levanta el corazón con
júbilo...’(Two presences of God, two realities of such sure reverential
efficacy that merely the enunciation of their names suffices to enlarge
any verse and raise jubilation in our hearts...), ‘La pampa y el suburbio
son dioses’in El tamaño de mi esperanza, 1926, p. 18. As for the
exclusive use by Borges of the masculine pronoun for the universal
human subject I can only apologise beforehand for his rampant sexism
and deplore such chauvinism.
67
I am not, of course, attempting to construct a narrative from the order
in which the poems in Fervor de Buenos Aires appear, but merely
339
102
Rosas, Juan Manuel de (1793-1877), Argentine dictator of the
1830s and '40s. Born in Buenos Aires, Rosas belonged to a family
prominent there under Spanish rule. Amassing great wealth as a
cattleman and beef exporter during the period of Argentina’s fledgling
independence, he emerged as a military strongman, or caudillo, and
champion of the country's conservative aristocracy, in 1827. From
1829 to 1832 he was governor of Buenos Aires Province, opposing
progressive political factions and favouring provincial autonomy. In
1833 he led a successful campaign against the Indians of southern
Argentina and two years later was reinstated as governor with
dictatorial powers. Supported by the Mazorca, an organisation that
terrorised his liberal Unitario opponents, Rosas formed alliances with
the strongmen who dominated the other Argentine provinces, winning
for himself control of the nation's foreign affairs and external trade. In
1843 he intervened in a civil war in neighbouring Uruguay, arousing
fears of Argentine expansionism. Great Britain and France retaliated by
blockading Buenos Aires, but Rosas persevered. In 1851 Justo
Urquiza (1800-70), a former supporter of Rosas, led a rebellion against
him backed by Brazil and Uruguay. Ousted in 1852, Rosas spent the
rest of his life in exile and died in England.
103
Borges ‘Rosas’Obras completas, 1974, pp. 28-9.
104
‘When I was writing this poem I was not unaware that one of my
grandfather’s grandfathers was one of Rosas’forebears. The fact is
unimportant if we remember how small our country’s population was
and the rather incestuous nature of our history.’Postface Obras
completas, p. 52. My translation. See also Manuel Mujica Lainez,
1964: Borges et les ancêtres, and Carlos T. de Pereira Lahitte, 1964:
Généalogie de Jorge Luis Borges both In L’Herne, 1964, pp. 151-155
& 156-158.
105
Borges, 1974, pp. 28-9.
106
Ibid, pp. 28-9.
107
Whether or not this rationality exists is a difficult point to prove, but it
is always the critic’s starting point, even when the rationality is of an
‘evangelical’kind. See Richard Blackmur 1973: A Burden for Critics. In
Gregory T. Polletta (ed) 1973, p. 69.
108
Among these logical conditions is a general reverence for all life,
including the dictator Rosas, whose political crimes seem to be
forgiven by Borges here. By this I mean not to deny Borges an
individual pantheism, but to pursue a determinist approach to the
345
114
Borges in “An Autobiographical Essay” p. 218.
115
But what I'm calling an immanentist position, which is actually only
the suggestion of the power of words that the poet feels in the act of
expression, is not merely a sensation of wonderment, but the
expression of a conjunction between the lexical and allusive worlds:
‘Even if the indirect meaning is apparently present, as is the case for
example with Metaphors of the in presentia type, the very fact of
bringing together the two meanings, can be interpreted in countless
ways... Comparison is inherently double, with an antecedent
(discursive) equivalence and a consequent (symbolic) equivalence, to
use Paul Henle’s terms.’Tzvetan Todorov 1982a: Symbolism and
Interpretation, p. 80.
116
‘Sur l’évolution litteraire’in Stéphane Mallarmé 1945: Œ uvres
Complètes. Paris: NRF, p. 870.
117
A very Aristotelian point of view, as William Gass notes in The
Concept of Character in Fiction. In Gregory T. Polletta (ed) 1973,
(1973a) p. 700.
118
‘Sur l’évolution litteraire’p. 870.
119
Ibid, p. 870.
120
‘Sur Poe’in Stéphane Mallarmé 1945, p. 872. See also M. M.
Bakhtin/P. N. Medvedev 1978: The Formal Method in Literary
Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. Translated
by Albert J. Wehrle, p. 57 ff.
121
No doubt his reading of Bergson influenced him here. Take his
thoughts on the succession of mental images of quantity giving us our
sense of space: ‘When it is said that an object occupies a large space
[...] we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered
the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories, and that in this
sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view. But
this wholly dynamic way of looking at things is repugnant to the
347
132
Borges Obras completas, 1974, pp. 28-29.
133
“He”is transhistorical because he cannot be called to account for
his crimes, and therefore seems to exist for Borges as a logical idea
rather than a real person to whom guilt (which is always historical) may
be ascribed. As for any argument based on the special place of poetry
in discourse (‘A poem is closer to common speech than it is to non-
literary discursive writing.’Graham Hough 1976: ‘An Eighth Type of
Ambiguity’, p. 240.) I can only claim that if this is true, then we should
find it easier to communicate in iambic pentameters than we do
presently.
134
Borges employs this genetic causalism in ‘El muerto’where the
narrative is recounted by a ‘dead’man (i.e. doomed to die). In ‘El
muerto’, 1974, pp. 545-549. ‘La otra muerte’seems to reverse genetic
causalism by proposing an undoable past, yet it more justly creates a
multiplicity of causalities each imbued with its moment of divergence.
‘La otra muerte’, 1974, pp. 571-575; ‘La espera’, 1974, pp. 608-611.
135
See Carter Wheelock’s definition of myth as the potential of
abstraction: for Borges it would seem that the familiarity of an intimate
environment becomes the ground upon which historical experience is
projected and actualised. See Carter Wheelock 1969: The Mythmaker:
A Study of Motif And Symbol In The Short Stories of Jorge Luis
Borges, p. 23.
136
Borges, Obras completas, 1974, pp. 28-29. As Jonathan Tittler
notes such a strategy is ‘kinetically’ironic, since it relies on the
accumulation of popular mis-receptions to fashion the historical text of
‘Rosas’. See Narrative Irony in the Contemporary Spanish-American
Novel. 1984, p. 144.
137
‘...twice in my life I have had the experience of being in a timeless
world. That was given to me only twice throughout my life. I had been
very happy one day - I suddenly felt that I was outside time. I don’t
know how long it lasted. It was a very strange experience.’In Borges at
Eighty: Conversations, 1982, p. 167. Also see Ibid, pp. 72-3, 11. In a
postface to ‘Hell’s Duration’in Discusión Borges gives another
description of this experience, finding himself in a closed room with
only a chink of light falling on the table, he thinks, ‘... ¿dónde estoy? y
comprendí que no lo sabía. Pensé ¿quién soy? y no me pude
reconocer. El miedo creció en mí. Pensé: esta vigilia desconsolada ya
es el infierno, esta vigilia sin destino será mi eternidad. Entonces
desperté de veras: temblando.’In ‘La duración del infierno’in
350
verbs that allow it to be, or all the adjectives that can be attached to it.
See Georges Poulet 1973: Phenomenology of Reading. In Gregory T.
Polletta (ed) 1973, pp. 103-119. Geoffrey H. Hartman uses what might
be called Poulet’s subjective ventriloquism (where one ego is always
at a little distance away in the act of reading, calling winsomely to its
master-ego) to support the case for the Tlönistas against the
formalists. Geoffrey H. Hartman 1973: Beyond Formalism, pp. 168-
172. But how is this “I” to be allowed a voice? How is it to “admonish”
the socio-political climate in which it finds itself? For a critique of
Hartman’s naive radicalisation of art as a force for social change, see
Michael Sprinkler 1983: Aesthetic Criticism: Geoffrey Hartman. In
Jonathan Arac; Wlad Godzich; Wallace Martin (eds) 1983: The Yale
Critics: Deconstruction in America, pp. 43-65.
165
See Genette on the comment by French rhetorician César
Dumarsais that a large number of these tropes ‘actually duplicate the
literal word instead of making up for its absence.’Gérard Genette
1982b: Figures of Literary Discourse, p. 51.
166
One need hardly comment that this is the central theme of much of
Borges’short fictional work, including ‘The Circular Ruins’and ‘The
Secret Miracle’, an idea which finds its most personal expression in
Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem a novel that Borges used to teach
himself German prose in Geneva.
167
The world is held in place by the perceiver, but the perceiver too
may be perceived by another perceiver, and so on ad infinitum, until
the act of perception itself becomes logically impossible since it relies
on a basic distinction between perceiver and perceived dissolving in a
miasma of inter-subjectification.
168
Borges, 1974, p. 43.
169
This position cannot, however, relieve the individual of his or her
responsibilities to existence. As Borges notes in ‘Historia de los ecos
de un nombre’, 1974, pp. 753: ‘Precisamente por haber escrito El
mundo como voluntad y como representación, Schopenhauer sabía
muy bien que ser un pensador es tan ilusorio como ser un enfermo o
un desdeñado y que él era otra cosa, profundamente.’Borges had
arrived at this opinion of Schopenhauer’s dilemma as early as 1925: ‘El
yo no existe. Schopenhauer, que parece arrimarse muchas veces a
esa opinión la desmiente tácitamente, otras tantas, no sé si adrede o si
forzado a ello por esa basta y zafia metafísica - o más bien ametafísica
355
216
Samuel Johnson 1968 [1781]: Cowley in Lives of the Poets. Vol I.
London: Oxford University Press, p. 14.
217
Of course, I abjure these blatantly sexist comments, fully
acknowledging that the absence of women in the life of philosophical
discourse in former times was due to the conspiracy of patriarchy to
silence women’s critical knowledge.
218
Bella Brodzski examines Borges’use of the figure of Woman as
Muse in his later works, deftly diagnosing the mutually antagonistic
tropes of ritualised idealisation and profanation. Like the maddening
Aleph, like writing itself, woman is a figure of transcendentalist
attraction who outstrips the formal constraints of description. See
‘Borges and the Idea of Woman’, 1993.
219
See Linda S. Maier, 1994 ‘Borges’Early Love Poetry,’p. 49.
220
Actually this would be Borges’ first marriage: in 1986, the year of his
death, he and his long time amanuensis and collaborator María
Kodama, were married.
221
‘El General Quiroga va en coche al muere’in Luna de enfrente
[1925]Obras completas, Buenos Aires Emecé Editores, 1974, p. 61.
222
‘Último sol en Villa Ortúzar’ibid, p. 71.
223
‘Versos de catorce’ibid, p. 73.
224
See ‘Poema de los dones’, 1974, pp. 809-810; The Unending Gift’,
p. 984; ‘Otro poema de los dones’in El Otro, El Mismo, 1974, pp. 936-
937.
225
‘Mi vida entera’ibid, p. 70.
226
Loc. cit, p. 70.
227
Loc. cit, p. 70.
228
Loc. cit, p. 70.
229
Loc. cit, p. 70. Borges was to parody his gift for verbal recirculation
in ‘Los teólogos’where two theologians literally conduct a war of words
that continues in paradise after their deaths. ‘Los teólogos’, 1974, pp.
550-556.
230
‘Mi vida entera’, p. 70.
231
In Borges’writings Carriego assumes a mythic stature. For
example, the opening sentence of an essay ‘Carriego y el sentido del
arrabal’in the collection El tamaño de mi esperanza, (Buenos Aires:
Editorial Proa, 1926) parodies the opening sentence from Cervantes’
Don Quijote: ‘En un calle de Palermo de cuyo nombre sí quiero
acordarme...’(In a street of Palermo whose name I want very much to
remember...) p. 25. When, for example, the importance that Borges
363
247
This kind of sublime adoration seems not to be the type that Vijay
Mishra, quoting Peter de Bolla ( The Discourse of the Sublime:
Readings in History, Aesthetics and the Subject. Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1989) theorises for female experience of the sublime in
regard to a melding of subject and object in rejection of
phallologocentricism. The female subject, Mishra ponders, may herself
be a site for contestation of any idea of subject position as such. The
sublime may be ‘ideological and critical, since it draws its strength
from a critique of a sublime male subjectivity’and even (directly
quoting de Bolla) ‘leak into the subject’which can be seen as a feminist
reading that chimes disconsonantly with Borges’views on the artist as
the often unwilling subject of a God that remains immune to human
contact. But anyway, this is not Mishra’s aim. See Vijay Mishra 1994:
The Gothic Sublime, p. 21. Regarding the category of the sublime at
all Daniel O’Hara notes in an indirectly related appraisal of Bloom:
‘Bloom’s topic is the sublime and how one would compose a counter-
sublime of one’s own to best the precursor at his own game.’In my
opinion Vijay Mishra has given the best account of creative
sublimorrhoea with twenty counter-sublimes. See Daniel O’Hara 1983:
The Genius of Irony: Nietzsche in Bloom. In Jonathan Arac; Wlad
Godzich; Wallace Martin (eds) 1983: The Yale Critics: Deconstruction
in America, p. 120.
248
It may be argued that God and the sublime are not contiguous
terms, since the former is most usually used as a personification of
nature, the universe, have what you will, rather than as a cryptograph
for the very process of attempting to conceive the infinitely great. But is
this illimitable term really very different from my own attempts to name
the unnameable? As Mishra notes of Wordsworth’s longing for the
loss of individuality as a means of experiencing a transcendent nature
(see Mishra: The Gothic Sublime, pp. 34-5) Kant’s definition of
sublimity in the Critique of Judgement as ‘...the mere capacity of
thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard
of sense’(in Mishra, p. 33) becomes a verbal talisman for a Nature that
has become God, and by extension, Man.
249
‘Caminata’in Fervor de Buenos Aires, 1974, p. 43.
263
‘La adjetivación’in El tamaño de mi esperanza, 1926, pp. 50-51.
See also Alazraki, 1988, p. 131. Baudrillard captures this nostalgia for
sources when he diagnoses the myth of origin as a device that exists
to ‘conjures time in the ambient system’(i.e. the system of relations
that determines a particular historical and cultural domain). There is in
fact a ‘particular status of the bygone object’as Borges would, had he
read Baudrillard, have confirmed. But he would also, perhaps uneasily,
have recognised himself as the conjurer of this disappearing trick. See
Jean Baudrillard 1990a: ‘Subjective Discourse or The Non-Functional
System of Objects’in Jean Baudrillard 1990: Revenge of the Crystal, p.
36. Roman Jakobson notes that in cases of aphasics losing their ability
to distinguish between personal pronouns in speech, this loss may not
indeed have a parallel with the loss of spatio-temporal markers (p. 20).
He concludes that where pronouns have the function of presenting
themselves to the subject as distinct epithets (my, his, her, ours, etc)
they are forgotten as possessives, but are retained as far as they are
construed as parts of a grammatical structure in speech. See Roman
Jakobson 1975: Les règles des dégâts grammaticaux, in Julia Kristeva;
Jean-Claude Milner; Nicolas Ruwet (eds) 1975 pp. 19.
264
‘La adjetivación’in El tamaño de mi esperanza, 1926, pp. 57-58.
265
Ibid, p. 58. English translation slightly modified.
266
‘Ejercicio de análisis’in El tamaño de mi esperanza, 1926, p. 107.
As Claude Lévi-Strauss notes of myth in the tradition of ancient Greek
and indigenous North American cultures, the act of ‘forgetting’during
myth-telling is often a way of relocating the speaker within the
community as one who must be helped to a shared meaning. The
same kind of thing seems to be going for St. Augustine, since in
claiming to be ignorant of time, he actually allows the reader to
complete his meaning, i.e. Time is a mystery of God. Claude Lévi-
Strauss 1975: Mythe et oubli. In Julia Kristeva; Jean-Claude Milner;
Nicolas Ruwet (eds) 1975 p. 299. Obviously Borges’clarity of purpose
has been lost to its newly contemporary English-speaking audience,
even becoming, along with Barthelme, a stylistic admonishment. See
Thomas McCormack 1989: The Fiction Editor, The Novel, and the
Novelist, p. 52.
267
‘Ejercicio de análisis’in El tamaño de mi esperanza, 1926, p. 107.
268
Ibid, p. 108. It is important not to confuse Borges’use of a couplet
as an example for the purpose of analysis, and any intention on the
part of Cervantes in writing it. As for a discussion in the analytic vein of
369
just what Cervantes may have intended in writing Don Quijote the
reader is directed to A. J. Close’s ‘Don Quixote and the “Intentionalist
Fallacy”’, pp. 174-193.
269
Julia Kristeva would tend to agree with Borges here, according to
my reading. Where she notes that the act of predication ( i.e. the act of
isolating a predication as an énoncé) carries with it a deictic locative
(i.e. it demonstrates in a physical sense where the predicate must be,
namely on the right hand side of the subject) she describes a process
Borges outlines in his theory of the preposition as a foretaste of the
predicate. It is there, and in the act of being there it carries with it an
impulse to determine its predicate as a somewhere into which it can
penetrate. See Julia Kristeva 1975a: La fonction prédicative et le sujet
parlant. In Julia Kristeva; Jean-Claude Milner; Nicolas Ruwet (eds)
1975 p. 235-236.
270
Pretty rightly as it turns out. See Ralph Penny, 1991: A History of
the Spanish Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p.
196.
271
See Michael Riffaterre 1978: Semiotics of Poetry, pp. 1-5; Diane
Griffin Crowder 1982: ‘The Semiotic Functions of Ideology in Literary
Discourse’in Harry R. Garvin (ed) 1982: Literature and Ideology, pp.
157-8.
272
Borges 1974: ‘Las kenningar’, p. 368. Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241)
Icelandic historian, poet, and political figure, ranks among the foremost
historiographers of the Middle Ages, and composer of the
Heimskringla, a history of the kings of Norway from legendary times
until 1177, and the Younger Edda, a handbook for poets, concerned
with the rationale of poetic diction, especially the elaborate Metaphors
(kennings) then widely used.
273
‘Magias parciales del Quijote’, 1974, p. 667: ‘En la realidad, cada
novela es un plano ideal; Cervantes se complace en confundir lo
objetivo y lo subjetivo, el mundo del lector y el mundo del libro.’
274
‘Ejercicio de análisis’in El tamaño de mi esperanza, 1926, p. 114.
The reader will note with some surprise that Borges’opinion is directly
opposed to that which he would express in ‘Pierre Menard, author of
the Quixote’. In that fiction a few lines from Cervantes acquire added
levels of significance when they are reproduced by an author living in
the 20th century. In other words, in the ‘Menard”fiction it is the
accumulation of historical detail that gives a work its meaning, not the
conjunction of its lexical resources alone. If we accept Borges’earlier
370
279
With the help of Borges’later studies I attempt to illuminate this task
in Chapter Five of the present work.
280
‘Profesión de fe literaria’in El tamaño de mi esperanza, 1926, p.
146. But Cf. ‘La felicidad escrita’ in El idioma de los argentinos, pp.
45-53; ‘Un soneto de don Francisco de Quevedo’ in ibid, p. 81;
‘Quevedo’, 1974, p. 661: ‘La grandeza de Quevedo es verbal.’
281
‘Chapter 2: Una vida de Evaristo Carriego’, 1974, p. 113.
282
‘Profesión de fe literaria’in El tamaño de mi esperanza, 1926, p.
147. Cf. Benjamin: ‘What does language communicate? It
communicates the mental being corresponding to it. It is fundamental
that this mental being communicates itself in language and not through
language.’In ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’in
Walter Benjamin 1979: One-Way Street, p. 108. And also ‘Borges here
[i.e. in ‘Idioma de los argentinos’] sees language as a dangerous
invitation to the writer to exploit the resources which it offers him
without regard for what himself wishes to say.’In Thomas H. Hart
1990: ‘The Literary Criticism of Jorge Luis Borges’in Richard Macksey
(ed.) 1974, pp. 286-87.
283
See Gustave Spiller 1902: The Mind of Man: a Text-Book of
Psychology. p. 379 ‘What has been said as to adjectives is true also of
other important parts of speech. Their value in the sonnets is often
unmistakable, while, at the same time, they tend to give weight and
dignity to many of the sentences and thoughts. In these details of
Shakespeare’s style he cannot be called original, though undoubtedly
he recognised their usefulness to a greater extent than most of his
contemporaries. In that, and in that alone, lay his pre-eminence. His
claim to inventiveness must be dismissed.’
284
Borges 1921, p. 471. Borges’comments on the ‘vagabond I’most
probably come from William James’dismissal of the ego as a
continuous, autonomous entity, and not as the succession of memories
that can be momentarily plucked from their passage for the briefest of
inspections. Cf. Chapter XII of William James 1910: Psychology, pp.
176-7, 200-201.
285
Borges 1921, p. 468.
286
Borges 1928: ‘Indagación de la palabra’ in El idioma de los
argentinos, p. 9. But this must have been just a front, as one his
colleagues Alicia Jurado comments: ‘Il convient de préciser, à ce
propos, que Borges est très loin d’être l’homme froid, indifférent et
implacablement rationaliste qu’imaginent beaucoup de ses lecteurs,
372
314
Borges ‘Indagación de la palabra’, p. 25. We might remember
Croce’s elevation of the meanings of word beyond their dictionary-
bindings. Where language is identified with poetics, we are liberated
from ‘intellectualistic or rationalistic definitions of the parts of speech,
disjunctions between proper and Metaphorical speech, and so on.’
Benedetto Croce 1922: ‘The Philosophy of Language’in Aesthetic, as
Science of Expression and General Linguistic p. 256. As the evidence
shows, Borges was ready to revise philosophical viewpoints as he
came to them, using a salient point to advance an argument without
being tied down to a restrictive integration.
315
Actually to a Spanish speaker enun sounds like a contraction of
enano, or “dwarf”, while lugardela could be confused with lucha de ‘la
for “fights for her” and mancharde might mean “in order to stain”
[manchar + de] giving the possible sense The dwarf fights for her to
stain her, which puts an entirely different complexion on things.
Borges provides another example of possible enfrasis in relating that
the foreman in ‘The End of the Duel’was based on a real foreman of
Carlos Reyles called “Laderecha” (La derecha = the right [hand]) in di
Giovanni, Norman Thomas & Halpern, Daniel, MacShane, Frank (eds.)
1973: Borges on Writing. New York: E. P. Dutton, p. 25. For another
example of the value of punning in Metaphoric transcription, see
Borges, Jorge Luis 1964a: Deux notes bibliographiques. In L’Herne,
1964, p. 98.
316
Borges ‘Indagación de la palabra’, p. 25.
317
Borges ‘El arte de narrativo y la magia’, p. 229.
318
This is literally a case of symbols moonlighting. See Nelson
Goodman 1979: Metaphor as Moonlighting, pp. 175-180.
319
See Northrop Frye 1976: Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature,
Myth, and Society, 247. On the matter of defining what is meant by
inferring something, I have not been able to surpass Morse Peckham’s
elegant description of the inference of intention as ‘...a way of
accounting for or explaining the generation of an utterance’. While not
a report, my own comments on Borges’process of inferring do suggest
a way of accounting for what I have called a “mistake”in terms that are
consistent with his later comments. See Morse Peckham 1976: ‘The
Intentional? Fallacy?’, p. 155.
320
Borges ‘Indagación de la palabra’p. 27.
321
Willis Barnstone (ed.) 1982: Borges at Eighty: Conversations, p. 13.
377
322
We will encounter Borges’investigation of the image of whiteness in
Morris’The Life and Death of Jason and Melville’s Moby Dick in the
following chapter .
323
See Borges at Eighty, p. 164.
324
‘Las kenningar’p. 369. My parentheses.
325
‘Indagación de la palabra’p. 27.
326
I'm aware that this seems a backward step in modern Australian
functional linguistics, where grammatical classifications are only seen
as useful in their greater contextualisation of speakers’construction of
meaning, but it’s useful for Borges who employs grammatical
classifications as quasi-functional operators. Thus, grammar becomes
semantically modal - it allows subjects to construct utterances on the
basis of grammatical potential, as well as formal codification. Modality
becomes therefore an act, as well an effect, of grammatical potential.
For a discussion (using a combination of textual analysis and possible
worlds theory) of the cross contamination of modality in fictional
argument in Borges see Marie-Laure Ryan 1991: Possible Worlds,
Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, especially pp. 193-200.
327
Except, that is, in the rare case of onomatopoeia.
328
The AFL (Australian Football League) is the publicity and marketing
division for Australia’s civil religion, Aussie Rules Football, a nationally
televised tribal spectacle.
329
See ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’in Ficciones, pp. 431-443.
330
‘Indagación de la palabra’, p. 28.
331
Ibid 20.
332
‘Las kenningar’p. 375.
332 El arte narrativo y la magia, in Discusión, Buenos Aires, Emecé
Editores 1974, p. 229.
334
As Jeremy Hawthorn notes in a discussion of the crisis of reference
between text and world: ‘The effect of this [radical juxtaposition of
definitions] on the reader may be the same as that felt by Foucault,
when he read a similarly comic and disorienting list in Borges.’That list
occurs in the Introduction to The Order of things, and acts as a tutelary
image for the western epistemic tradition. See Jeremy Hawthorn (ed.)
1984: Criticism and Critical Theory, p. 137. My parentheses. But is the
subject vanished, or does Foucault’s “anxiety” reflect a too-strident
protest that is meant to make us look again? See Richard Poirier,
1987a: The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections, pp. 185-
378
188. Even when Foucault remarks that ‘the radical effacement of this
gradation [i.e. from first order to second order discourse] can only ever
be play, utopia, or anguish’one is aware that the anguish must itself be
effaced in recognising the second order’s return as ‘lyrical’or as the
bearer of a ‘freshness’that the reader has forgotten. See Michel
Foucault 1971: The Order of Discourse. In Robert Young (ed) 1981:
Untying the Text, p. 57.
335
Roland Barthes 1977: Image Music Text Translated by Stephen
Heath: London: Fontana. Flamingo, p. 51.
336
‘Eduardo Wilde’in El idioma de los argentinos, pp. 155-162. See
also ‘Acotaciones’in El tamaño de mi esperanza, 1926, p. 95.
337
See Jaime Alazraki 1988: Borges and the Kabbalah, p. 92.
338
‘Eduardo Wilde’ in El idioma de los argentinos, p. 158.
339
Note that a “noun-group” differs from a syntagm in that groups of
nouns don’t necessarily entail any in absentia association. Their
relationship may be strictly reciprocal. ‘John’s hat’merely states a
possessive relationship John has to his hat, and the fact of this
particular hat being the possession of John.
340
‘Eduardo Wilde’, pp. 158-159.
341
Borges at Eighty: Conversations, p. 36. Jean Baudrillard also
acknowledges this syntagmatic gulf between English and another neo-
latinate language (French) when, in proposing that language might well
be conceived as a series of ‘transferential functions’and that ‘the
whole of sociality could well be described in terms of a Deleuzian
unconscious or monetary mechanism (or even in terms of Riesman’s
“other directedness”, which already refers to this floating of identities -
but alas, in terms that are all too Anglo-Saxon and hardly
schizophrenic).’Jean Baudrillard 1990c: ‘The End of Production’in
Jean Baudrillard 1990: Revenge of the Crystal, p. 115. Alfonso de Toro
proposes a rhizomorphic reading of Borges’intersubjectivisation in El
productor ‘rizomórfico’y el lector como ‘detective literario,’based on an
implicit acceptance of symbolically concrete values (p. 157). In Blüher,
Karl Alfred and Toro, Alfonso de (eds.) 1995, pp. 113-168.
342
Tzvetan Todorov 1975: The Fantastic: A Structuralist Approach to a
Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard. Foreword by Robert
Scholes. New York: Cornell University Press.
343
Gene Bell-Villada, 1981: Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His
Mind and Art, p. 80. As Jean Ricardou comments: ‘...sitôt abandonné
l’a priori de la solution privilégiée, le transit d’une solution à telle
379
351
‘La Aventura y el Orden...A la larga, toda aventura individual
enriquece el orden de todos y el tiempo legaliza innovaciones y les
otorga virtud justificativa.’Borges in ‘La aventura y el orden’in El
tamaño de mi esperanza, 1926, p. 71.
352
Translation adapted from ‘El idioma de los argentinos’, p. 164.
353
‘A los criollos les quiero hablar...Mi argumento de hoy es la patria:
lo que hay en ella de presente, de pasado y de venidero.’(I wish to
speak to the criollos...My argument today is one of the Fatherland, that
Fatherland inhabiting it now, in the past, and in the future.‘Borges in
El tamaño de mi esperanza’in El tamaño de mi esperanza, 1926, pp.
5. However, Malcolm K. Read would, on equally plausible grounds and
from Borges’own comments, strongly disagree with me here, charging
me with a self-fulfilling structuralist thesis. The plain fact is that it’s
impossible to derive any unitary thesis out of the Borgesian corpus, as
Read himself acknowledges in Borges’revisionism of Platonism in his
conversations with Richard Burgin. One must do one’s best, and to hell
with the competition. See Jorge Luis Borges and His Predecessors: or,
Notes towards a materialist history of linguistic idealism, 1993, p. 38.
354
Willis Barnstone (ed.) 1982: Borges at Eighty: Conversations, pp.
92-93.
355
See ‘El idioma analítico de John Wilkins’, pp. 706-709. John Wilkins
(1614-1672), apart from being Bishop of Chester and chaplain to
Bishop Berkeley’s great grandfather, was also Oliver Cromwell’s
brother-in-law. In an extremely varied intellectual life he wrote on the
possible government of the moon, and how we might travel there by
the art of flying, speculated that the earth is one of the planets (till then
a radical notion) and even wrote a treatise on mental communication
over distance - what we might call telepathy today. His work on an
idealist human character and a universal philosophical language thus
falls naturally enough in integrity and ambition into the body of his
speculations. As Horace Walpole remarks in a letter to H. S. Conway
of October 15, 1784: ‘I discovered an alliance between Bishop Wilkin’s
art of flying, and his plan of universal language; the latter of which he
no doubt calculated to prevent the want of an interpreter when he
should arrive at the moon.’Extract quoted in S. Austin Allibone (ed)
1871: Allibone’s Dictionary of English Literature and British and
American Authors. Volume III. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co.
356
See ‘Kafka y sus precursores’, 1974, pp. 710-712. He may even
spawn slick imitators as far away as Australia who, attempting to flee
381
the crushing banality of their native land, exult in the license he seems
to grant them in rewriting the past and claiming that they have really
been cosmopolitan (the anguished cry of the embittered parochial) all
the time. See Robert Ross 1990: “It Cannot Not Be There”: Borges
and Australia’s Peter Carey. In Edna Aizenberg (ed) 1990: Borges and
his Successors: The Borgesian Impact on Literature and the Arts, pp.
48-49.
357
Speaking of poetic production Harold Bloom notes the mystery of
authorial ascription when he concludes that ‘the initial trope or image in
any new poem is closely related to the hidden presence of the new
poem in its precursor poem.’Harold Bloom 1975: Kabbalah and
Criticism, p. 64.
358
This system is not unique: in 1850 Letellier constructed an analogue
through which by concatenations of vowels and consonants, each
representing a zoological phylum, any species could be conveniently
described; in that of 1845 by Bonifacio Sotos Ochando the universe
could be mapped by a series of regular terminals to the root verb. The
complexity of such a world-naming system should not therefore be
entirely dismissed as a Borgesian incitement to the indecipherability of
the universe, as Jaime Alazraki does in Chapter 11 ‘Oxymoronic
structure in Borges’essays’of his Borges and the Kabbalah, 1988, p.
141; or as Debra A. Castillo assumes (See The Translated World: A
Postmodern Tour of Libraries in Literature, p. 94.) As I show,
regardless of any rhetorical strategy accreted by subsequent criticism,
Borges’early essays provide a coherent programme for language and
poetics. In 1640 the French grammarian Nicolas Le Gras proposed to
Cardinal Richelieu that a school be set up to teach the liberal arts in
French rather than Latin. His main argument for rejecting Latin was
one that Wilkins would have approved: ‘Behold, even though the
languages of diverse folk are in themselves diverse, they carry within
themselves mental concepts that are in no way dissimilar.’(My
translation.) Quoted by Marcel Bataillon 1975: Quelques idées
linguistiques du XVIIe siécle. Nicolas Le Gras. In Julia Kristeva; Jean-
Claude Milner; Nicolas Ruwet (eds) 1975 p. 28.
359
Of course, ‘Funes Memorius’presents the logically converse case:
Funes, the extreme nominalist, becomes subsumed by the
individualising possibilities of denotation. For a discussion of the way in
which redundancy (i.e. repeated characters, words, etc. in texts, and
by extension libraries) can act to interfere with the transmission of
382
387
See ‘Interpreting the Big Book’in Frank Kermode 1991: The Uses of
Error, pp. 17-28.
388
Borges’naive pragmatism at this stage in his development would be
unrecognisable to those critics who are used to assigning his method
to the play of absences. Thus, Pierre Macherey’s comment that it is
only by a recognition of the incomplete or missing book that Borges’
real books can be granted their labyrinthine completeness that the
Borges of ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’can be recognised (Pierre
Macherey 1978: ‘Borges and the Fictive Narrative’in A Theory of
Literary Production. p. 257). Such a view presupposes a Borges who
has been working over the years to establish such a position, but as
my discussion indicates, this is not apparent from his earlier work to
establish a language theory that could be used as the basis of a
poetics.
389
‘El otro Whitman’p. 208.
390
‘El concepto de texto definitivo no corresponde sino a la religión o al
cansancio.’‘Las versiones homéricas’in Discusión, 1974, p. 239.
391
One is, of course, caught in the toils of a conundrum centred in the
margin between public and private authorship and readership here.
There is no means as far as I can see of breaking the impasse, since
defending either side merely pushes the debate to a higher, and more
rarefied, level of argument, and generates its own meta-critique. At
some point one must simply opt for a reasonable guess as to the
author’s intention, and show that it is not inconsistent with those
passages which have been cited to support the case. When E. D.
Hirsch Jr. remarks, defending Plato’s criticism of authorial intent, he
too is obliged to fall back on a good guess based on his belief about
Plato’s intentions in mounting the critique: ‘When Plato observed that
poets could not explain what they meant, he intimated that poets were
ineffectual, weak-minded, and vague - particularly with respect to their
“most elaborate passages”. But even he would not have contended
that a vague, uncertain, cloudy, and pretentious meaning is not a
meaning, or that it is not the poet’s meaning.’(My emphasis) See E. D.
Hirsch Jr. 1976a: ‘In Defense of the Author’, p. 102. Also see F. E.
Sparshott ‘Criticism and Performance’p. 114 in the same volume.
392
‘El idioma analítico de John Wilkins’, p. 708.
393
Tzvetan Todorov 1975: The Fantastic: A Structuralist Approach to a
Literary Genre, p. 4. Laura Silvestri investigates Borges’use of
personal details in key later texts ( El otro y El libro de arena) to
387
401 This is not to say that Borges’theory obeys the law of the
crescendo, which would imply an unnecessary psychologism. See
Kenneth Burke 1962: ‘The Poetic Process’in Wilbur Scott 1962: Five
Approaches to Literary Criticism, pp. 75-90. As will be obvious, the
theory is a direct product of Borges’Ultraist manifesto, maintaining the
importance of the everyday world of experience and criticising the
sterility of self-consciously high art.
402
Although he fails to mention it, Borges clearly inherits this prejudice
against psychological description from Henry James’1884 essay ‘The
Art of Fiction’which proposes a strictly causal regimen for narrative
description.
403
W. H. Gass 1969: ‘Imaginary Borges’in The New York Review of
Books, 20 November, p. 5. For candid, and not always complimentary,
comments on Borges’choice of lecture material for his course in
English literature at the University of Buenos Aires see Various
correspondents 1964: Entrevue avec les élèves de Borges. In L’Herne,
1964, pp. 48-52. See also Ronald Christ 1969: The Narrow Act:
Borges’Art of Illusion, 43; Gene Bell-Villada, 1981: Borges and His
Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art, p. 24.
404
Gene Bell-Villada, 1981: Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His
Mind and Art, p. 23.
405
Clearly a victory of taste over genius. See Irving Babbitt 1962:
‘Genius and Taste’in Wilbur Scott 1962: Five Approaches to Literary
Criticism, p. 40-41.
406
Borges at Eighty: Conversations. 1982, p. 163. As for the ploy of
reducing everything in the novel to its psychological symbology, see
Philip Rahv 1970: Literature and the Sixth Sense, p. 166.
407
Id est ad plures opinor et sic hoc deploro.
408
‘This is how Borges is usually interpreted: he is made to conclude [a
fiction] by having attributed to him the appearances of an intelligent
scepticism.’Pierre Macherey 1978: ‘Borges and the Fictive Narrative’
in A Theory of Literary Production, p. 252.
409
The best of these attempts is that of Gene Bell-Villada in Borges
and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art, 1981. Bell-Villada
acknowledges Borges’hostility to psychologism and wish to privilege
causal relations as the basis of narrative (1981, pp. 25, 41, 46) but
includes such a wealth of psychological explanations for character
389
427
Ibid, p. 230.
428
See Alazraki, 1988, pp. 129-30.
429
‘El arte narrativo y la magia’, p. 230. Joan Crawford established her
movie career as a glamour queen in the early 1930s in such
monuments to tinsel as Letty Lynton and Grand Hotel.
430
See Robert Heilman 1962: ‘The Turn of the Screw as Poem’in
Wilbur Scott 1962: Five Approaches to Literary Criticism, pp. 283-302.
431
One could add Plato’s fable of the cave, although with the proviso
that we remember that the Greek’s aim is to disabuse us of the reality
of imagery. For a discussion of the way in which Borges ‘modernises
the fantastic’(p. 445), see Juan José Barrientos 1989: Borges y
Lovecraft. Actas del X Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de
Hispanistas, Barcelona, 21-26 de agosto. Antonio Vilanova (ed.), Tomo
III, pp. 443-447.
432
‘El arte narrativo y la magia’, p. 230.
433
English author, diplomat and naval officer (1603-1665) an early
theorist of extreme homoeopathic and sympathetic remedies for
wounds, as this example would seem to demonstrate.
434
See James Frazer 1911: The Golden Bough, 3rd ed. Vol. I, Ch. III,
§§ 2, 3.
435
As Borges remarks to Rita Guibert: ‘I’ve never written a novel
because I think that as a novel has a consecutive existence for the
reader it may also have a purely consecutive existence for the writer.
On the other hand, a story is something that you take in at a single
reading. As Poe used to say: “There is no such thing as a long poem.”
In Rita Guibert 1973: Interview with Borges. In Seven Voices, pp. 79.
See also Graham Hough 1978: ‘Edgar Allan Poe’in Selected Essays,
p. 139.
436
‘El arte narrativo y la magia’, p. 231.
437
Or ontological purpose. See I. A. Richards 1976:
Complementarities: Uncollected Essays, p. 17.
438
This discovery of ‘certain mobile fragments’is, of course, the motor
of structuralism’s recombinative activity. See Roland Barthes 1973b:
The Structuralist Activity. In Gregory T. Polletta (ed) 1973, p. 125.
439
‘El arte narrativo y la magia’, p. 231. For one of the most illustrative
analyses of narrative contingency , see Umberto Eco, 1964: Apocalittici
e integrati: comunicazioni di mass e teorie della cultural di massa.
440
Borges was fascinated by the mechanics of detective fiction, rather
than by its moral presuppositions, contributing two essays to Crítica on
391
451
This process can even take place through dreams. See Volker
Roloff, Aspectos estético-receptivos en el discurso onírico de los
cuentos de Jorge Luis Borges. In Blüher, Karl Alfred and Toro, Alfonso
de (eds.) 1995, p. 61-82.
452
This collaboration is, of course, intended to be noticed from the
outset by the reader’s decision to participate in the making of meaning.
I at least do not believe that Borges would have approved of such a
case of wilful misreading as that of Stanislavsky’s staging of Chekhov’s
comedies The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard as high tragedies.
See W. K. Wimsatt 1976: ‘Genesis: A Fallacy Revived.’, p. 131. See
also Brian Rosebury 1988: Art and Desire: A Study in the Aesthetics of
Fiction, p. 244.
453
Borges, El arte narrativo y la magia, p. 232.
454
See Jaime Alazraki 1988: Borges and the Kabbalah, p. 171.
393
455
W. B Yeats 1900: ‘The symbolism of poetry’in David Lodge (ed.)
Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, 1972, p. 33.
456
Cf. T. S. Eliot 1919: ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’in David
Lodge (ed.) Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, 1972, pp. 71-77; T. S.
Eliot 1978: ‘From Poe to Valéry’in To Criticize the Critic: And Other
Writings, p. 39: ‘We must be careful to avoid saying that the subject
matter becomes ‘less important’. It has rather a different kind of
importance: it is important as means: the end is the poem.’ See Djelal
Kadir’s Questing Fictions: Latin America’s Family Romance, 1986, p.
88.
457
Borges: ‘La poesía gauchesca’in Discusión, pp. 179-197 passim.
‘Jorge Luis Borges ha señalado cuidadosamente la relación entre
Lussich y Hernández, y considera Los tres gauchos orientales
[Lussich, 1872] ‘un borrador incontinente, lánguido, ocasional, pero
utilizado y profético del Martín Fierro.’Valbuena Briones, Angel 1969:
Historia de la Literatura Española, Tomo 5, Literatura
Hispanoamericana, Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, p. 178. For the
benefit of the studious reader we add the following conceptual
reduction of Argentine literature’s tortuous relationship with a Spanish
literature it could only see as either derivative or predatory: Bartolomé
Hidalgo(1788-1822) Uruguayan poet and author of political satire in the
form of the cielito, a comic exchange favoured as a staple of gaucho
literature; D. Antonio Lussich (1848-1928) Uruguayan soldier, poet and
critic, author of Los tres gauchos orientales [1872] a poem that
purports to be the authentic voice of the gaucho and which profoundly
influenced Martín Fierro; José Hernández (1834-86) Argentine poet
and soldier, author of the national epic Martín Fierro [1872]; Leopoldo
Lugones (1874-1938) Modernist Argentine poet who celebrated the
pampa in a form of Virgilian verse; Antonio Ascasubi (1807-75); See
Luis Mario Schneider 1964: La place de Borges dans une histoire du
langage argentin. In L’Herne, 1964, pp. 137-143.
458
This is a departure from Beatriz Sarlo who privileges Borges’
cultural and literary hybridness, but this is only one way of reading him.
Like any great author Borges provides ample opportunity for multiple
interpretation. See Sarlo, 1993: p. 3.
459
Borges: ‘La poesía gauchesca’, p. 179.
460
This is why, when Borges creates Pierre Ménard’s recreation of a
passage from Don Quijote, its “richness” is meant to be taken
394
503
‘To reduce each Kenning to the word that it represents is not to
unveil mysteries, it is to abolish the poem.’Borges in Gérard Genette
1982b: Figures of Literary Discourse. This Borges is, however, utterly
at variance with the Borges who would much later claim in The Mirror
of Enigmas that the Cabbala offered its audience an absolutely effable
text, for which it was the duty of the astute reader to interpret. See
Valentine Cunningham 1984: Renoving That Bible: The Absolute text
of (Post) Modernism. In Frank Gloversmith (ed) 1984: The Theory of
Reading, pp. 21-22.
504
Calvert Watkins theorises that the root of the tapu comes from a
parallel between grammatical and semantic usage. A word that
sounds like (énoncé) a tapu root is associated with the ritual pollution
that it implies by the phenomenon of back-formation. Calvert Watkins
1975: La désignation indo-européene du « tabou ». In Julia Kristeva;
Jean-Claude Milner; Nicolas Ruwet (eds) 1975 pp. 208-214. One notes
a strong parallel between Watkins’findings on the etymology of “tabou”
with that of the Norse kenning, whose root “ken”implies ‘knowledge’
(O.Eng. cennan) of a ritual kind.
505
As a young man Borges was deeply affected by is acquaintance
with Norah Lange, an artist and writer of Norwegian extraction, and his
co-editor on the single sheet poster magazine that Buenos Aires’
fledgling Ultraists used to propagate their avant-guard views in the
immediate post-war years, due to being completely ignored by the
literary establishment until Fervor de Buenos Aires appeared in 1923.
Apart from the recompense of having agreeable friends and artistic
companions (he acknowledges the debt by dedicating ‘Llaneza’to
Norah’s younger sister Heidi - which Borges Castillianises as Haydée)
the Langes introduced Borges to the Norse kenning, a form he makes
explicit reference to in the long-suppressed Inquisiciones. See ‘Norah
Lange’in Inquisiciones, pp. 83-85. Borges also quotes a few lines of
Norah’s in ‘Examen de metáforas’(p. 79) in the same volume.
506
Borges: ‘Las kenningar’in Historia de la eternidad, p. 368.
507
For a discussion of only nine forms of the past tense, with modal
alternatives, see Lennart Åqvist 1976: ‘Formal Semantics for Verb
Tenses as Analyzed by Reichenbach’in Teun A. Van Dijk (ed) 1976,
pp. 229-236. Because of the modality of these tenses, they stand out
clearly as examples of the inseparability of narrator and the narrated
events which he or she must re-introduce into the present world.
508
Borges: ‘Las kenningar’in Historia de la eternidad, p. 368.
399
509
Ibid, p. 369.
510
Atomic sentences are those into which a complex sentence may be
analysed. The English complex sentence, “Paul Keating is a
megalomaniac wearing a Zegna suit” may be analysed into the two
atomic sentences, “Paul Keating is a megalomaniac” and “Paul Keating
is wearing a Zegna suit”. [Written before the 1996 March 2nd Federal
election, in which Paul Keating, the then Labor Prime Minister, was
defeated.]
511
Ultraísmo. Nosotros, Vol. XV, No. 151, p. 468.
512
Ibid, p. 468.
513
‘Las kenningar’p. 373.
514
This view is clearly a politics of desire which I have glossed as a
poetics of acquisition. Is the distinction important? See Eldar Olson’s
distinction between being or political instrumentality, and poetics in
Eldar Olson 1962: ‘“Sailing to Byzantium”: Prolegomena to a Poetics
of the Lyrics’in Wilbur Scott 1962: Five Approaches to Literary
Criticism, p. 216.
515
Ibid, p. 374.
516
Cicero: ‘Unlimited money, the sinews of war;’George Farquhar
(1678-1707) ‘Money is the sinews of love, as of war.’( Love and a
Bottle, II. 1).
517
Borges discusses the latter in Borges at Eighty: Conversations, p.
165.
518
Herman Melville 1953: Moby Dick, or The White Whale, pp. 184-
192. [First published 1851]
519
‘Las kenningar’p. 379. ‘Pierna del omóplato’translates as ‘leg of
the shoulder-blade’. Karsten Harries thinks that such dramatic
juxtaposition is a recent invention (‘The preference for tension, for
Metaphors of opposition and collision, is, if not exclusively, a modern
phenomenon which rests on a particular approach to poetry.’) but the
kennings demonstrate there is no ground for such a view. Karsten
Harries 1979: Metaphor and Transcendence, pp. 71-88.
520
Borges rejects any reductionist reading of dream images because it
tends to systematise and cathect, rather than diffuse them, thus
maintaining their mystery: ‘Los “textos oníricos”de Borges, que en una
mezcla de ensayo y relato exponen y analizan a la vez, son signos de
la fascinación del mundo onírico, pero también documentos de una
actitud lúdica e irónica ante el sueño: están tan lejos de las mitologías
oníricas arcaicas como de la interpretación reduccionista del sueño de
400
552
‘El asesino desinterasado Bill Harrigan’, in Historia de la infamia, p.
316. Quotation marks supplied in the original.
553
In Historia de la infamia, p. 345.
554
Perhaps Borges has been a little too successful in creating what
Christine Brooke-Rose (amongst others) refers to as a ‘fabulated
scholarship’. So far as his “inventions”go, I have found that, with a little
patient digging, even the most obscure reference can nearly always be
found right where Borges says they are. See Christine Brooke-Rose
1991: Stories, Theories and Things, pp. 171, 177.
555
‘Sobre el doblaje’in Discusión, 1974, p. 284.
556
Ibid, p. 284.
557
Or an eclectic postmodernist, both alternatives that would be
repugnant to Borges, although ironically his later work has been
enthusiastically received into the postmodern canon, along with
Nabakov, Beckett, Barthelme, Pynchon, Barth, etc. ‘The highly self-
conscious fictive “labyrinths” of Jorge Luis Borges, with their pastiches
of scholarly and historical documentation, deadpan realism, and
bizarre fantasy, are often cited as paradigms of postmodern literary
representation.’W. J. T. Mitchell 1990: ‘Representation’in Frank
Lentricchia and McLaughlin Thomas (eds) 1990: Critical Terms for
Literary Study, pp. 11-22. But Gerald Martin comments that Borges’
eclectic textualism, when read against his intrinsic irony, contributes to
a ‘culminating Western perspective’that acts to undo modernism from
the inside.’Gerald Martin 1989: Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin
American Fiction in the Twentieth Century, pp. 165-6. For a persuasive
dragooning of Borges into the postmodern canon, see Christopher
Nash 1987: World Postmodern Fiction: A Guide. Paradoxically, Norris
sees Paul de Man’s implicit rejection of Borges’status as a
postmodern author (based on de Man’s characterisation of the trend as
a ‘parody of modernism’) as still within the general orbit of this
annoying neologism. See Christopher Norris 1988: Paul de Man:
Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology. New York and
London: Routledge. Gerald Graff diagnoses Borges, both as author
and as literary celebrity, as being caught between two
postmodernisms. Borges as oft-writ-about celebrity can be drafted into
the canonical black-hole through the usual forces of critical gravity. The
other Borges, the one who writes, obliges us to view the prisons he
constructs for his characters as parables of postmodernism’s
discursive dilemma. ‘This condition of imprisonment, however, though
405
596
This is a madness which can never see itself as such, even when
the facts are presented to it. As Auerbach points out: ’When the knight
is informed by the wounded bachiller Alonso Lopez of the harm he has
done by his attack on the funeral procession [Book I, Ch. 19], he feels
nowise mortified or abashed. He had taken the procession for a satanic
apparition, and so it was his duty to attack it. He is satisfied that he has
done his duty and feels proud of it.’Erich Auerbach 1968: Mimesis:
The Representation of Reality in Western Literature p. 332. See also
Frederick Keener’s qualifications in M. Frederick Keener 1983: The
Chain of Becoming: The Philosophical Tale, the Novel, and a
Neglected Realism of the Enlightenment: Swift, Montesquieu, Voltaire,
Johnson, and Austen p. 209.
597
Borges, ‘El arte narrativo y la magia’, in Discusión, p. 232.
602
For the uses and abuses of such a strategy, see Paul A. Bové 1983:
Variations on Authority: Some Deconstructive Transformations of the
New Criticism. In Jonathan Arac; Wlad Godzich; Wallace Martin (eds)
1983: The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America, pp. 3-19.
603
Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, 1982, p.
54. The same thing applies, of course, to Borges. As Maurice Nadeau
comments: ‘Nous ne pouvons croire sur simple parole. Ce qui passe
l’entendement, le mythe le récupère...’Maurice Nadeau 1964: Borges
le perturbateur. In L’Herne, 1964, p. 109.
604
Norris foresees the dangers that authority and interrogation bring:
‘The deconstructors clearly expect that their texts will be read with care
and attention...Yet how can this be squared with their own professed
scepticism towards meaning, logic, truth and the very possibility of
communication?’Norris 1982, pp. 126-7.
605
As Gérard Genette notes, ‘criticism...is and will remain a
fundamental approach, and it can be predicted that the future of literary
studies resides essentially in the exchange and the necessary cross-
fertilisation between criticism and poetics - based on an awareness
and exploitation of their complementarity.’Gérard Genette 1990:
‘Criticism and Poetics’in Tzvetan Todorov 1990a, p. 10.
606
Compare the following eulogy to the deconstructive powers of the
Argentine: ‘L’admirable jeu de Borges n’est pas plus un jeu de
construction qu’un jeu de deconstruction, qu’un jeu de miroirs; car il
suffit de les nommer, ces derniers, pour qu’ils s’ouvrent, s’effondrent
(ou bien nous écrasent - mais l’accident, par rapport au temps, n’a
qu’une vertu statistique).’Michel Bernard 1964: Le bon usage. In
L’Herne, 1964, p. 116.
607
But this is not to assume that communication can be effected across
totally dissimilar worlds. As Teun A. Van Dijk maintains ‘A speaker-
system can only ‘form’an intention when certain conditions are
satisfied. Primarily, it must be in a state such that it has at least partial
knowledge about the hearer-system and its actual knowledge.’See
Teun A. Van Dijk 1976: ‘Pragmatics and Poetics’in Pragmatics of
Language and Literature, p. 30.
608
Even Derrida seems to agree, although in a very limited and partial
programme: ‘...the category of intention will not disappear; it will have
its place, but from this place it will no longer be able to govern the
entire scene and the entire system of utterance.’Jacques Derrida
1983: ‘Signature Event Context’in Margins of Philosophy. Translated
411
by Alan Bass p. 326. As Paul Bové points out, Paul de Man has
diagnosed the heart of the intentionalist problem, but one may see
even his critique, based as it is on a phenomenological reduction, to be
founded on an implicit materialism of the subject - ‘What, one may ask,
is speaking now except a self?’See Wlad Godzich 1983: The
Domestication of Derrida. In Jonathan Arac; Wlad Godzich; Wallace
Martin (eds) 1983: The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America, pp.
20-40.
609
It is important to note that my comments do not imply a general
theory of intention, but merely point to a use that is similar enough
across examples to be considered consistent. As to the original
intention (what started off the work of art in the first place) one is
always in some doubt: not even authors are very sure for very long, not
withstanding the flawless memory of Poe, but one may always argue
from the existence of a the text that there was an intention to write on a
certain subject, or in a certain style, or about a certain subject, and that
the text can be used evidentially to support the assertion. Even if, as
George Watson maintains (following R. G. Collingwood), all artistic
production is artistic reproduction to some extent, this does not entirely
discount the idea that one may view intention in terms of very general
formative conditions that can be viewed as a demonstration of a
similarity between texts written at different times or in different places.
See George Watson 1976: ‘The Literary Past.’, p. 170.
610
As Roman Jakobson remarks, commenting on Benveniste’s studies
of linguistic aphasia, ‘It is perfectly obvious that the first syntactic
structures to go are the most complex, and in the case of one’s
forgetting the rules of grammar (d’agrammatisme), the first to be lost is
the relation between the subject and the predicate.’(My translation.)
Roman Jakobson 1975: Les règles des dégâts grammaticaux, in Julia
Kristeva; Jean-Claude Milner; Nicolas Ruwet (eds) 1975 pp. 18. Is not
Derrida’s own denigration of the text an attempt to force this most
fundamental of separations (text/world) on our attention ?
611
‘Un estudio preciso y fervoroso de los otros géneros literarios, de
dejó creer que la vituperación y la burla valdrían necessariamente algo
más. El agresor (me dije) sabe que el agredido será él, y que
“cualquier palabra que pronuncie podrá ser invocada en su contra”.
‘Arte de injuriar’, 1974, pp. 419-423.
612
Et sa traductrice aussi. Gayatri Spivak, who speaks of ‘Humankind’s
common desire...for a stable centre, and for the assurance of mastery -
412
the first edition, Saussure, 1959, p. xvii. The confusions of this text are
instructive: the editors are searching for a book that is supposed to
come into existence from 1) Saussure’s and his students’notes, and 2)
the notes of his students made in previous years of existent material.
Saussure had failed to keep up with the task of writing ‘the book’that
was to be born from his ‘notes’, his historic mission would have to be
accomplished after the fact. Saussure, in dying, completes the
deconstructive act, serving as the material for his own posthumous
exergue from the inside.
618
Saussure, 1959, p. 123.
619
At the other extreme of pattern recognition stands the idiot savant,
who, like Funes the Memorius, ignores sequentiallity for the individual
‘numberness’of numbers. See Oliver Sacks 1985: The Man Who
Mistook His Wife for a Hat. London: Picador, p. 191.
620
Saussure, 1959, pp. 123-4. See Hume Treatise of Human Nature,
‘Of Knowledge and Probability’.
621
Saussure, 1959, p. 126.
622
Jacques Derrida Of Grammatology, 1976, p. 23. In a rare
engagement with contemporary existentialism Borges comments on
the more general aims of Heidegger’s philosophy, claiming that it
makes ‘each one of us the interested interlocutor of a secret and
continuous dialogue with nothing, or divinity.’‘Nota sobre (hacia)
Bernard Shaw’, 1974, p. 749. My translation.
623
Jacques Derrida The Archaeology of the Frivolous: Reading
Condillac. Translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press, 1980) Originally published Paris: Galilée, 1973. Paul
de Man also devotes something to the debate: an even shorter essay.
But whether his critique on Derrida’s ‘contingent polemics’of the text
can be made to stand in the light of his own rhetorical logomachy is
debatable. See Paul de Man 1983: Blindness and Insight: Essays in
the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Second Edition. Methuen:
London, pp. 104, 134, 140.
624
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, An Essay on the Origin of Human
Knowledge: Being a Supplement to Mr. Locke’s Essay on the Human
Understanding. Facsimile reproduction of the Thomas Nugent
translation of 1756, originally published in France 1746. Gainsville:
Scholars’Facsimiles and Reprints, 1971, pp. 303-4. My parentheses.
625
See Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’objections to
Jonathan Crewe’s position of the unassentability and ungroundability of
414
656
Ibid. p. 384.
657
90-108, esp. p. 95. Herman Rapaport, following De Man, notes that the
resistance to theory implicit in my own critique may be the product of
the wish to map grammatical functions onto rhetorical tropes that will
not bear the burden. While this may be true, I do not know how it could
be effectively shown to be true, since showing it would involve an
inevitable recourse to the grammaticality of the language in which it is
phrased. See Herman Rapaport 1990: Borges, De Man, and the
Deconstruction of Reading. pp. 139-154.
666
Borges, ‘Three Versions of Judas,’‘Theme of the Traitor and the
Hero’, and ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,’ Obras completas, 1974, pp.
514, 496 and 431 respectively.
667
It is typical of much modern criticism, criticism which has only the
later Borges to examine, that it mistakes the form for the function of the
props in Borges’narrative universe. Thus, Edward Said can confidently
assert in a discussion of reception theory that ‘The text gives way to a
lone voice, which thereafter gives way - in books like those
contrapuntal encyclopedias by Joyce ( Ulysses and Finnegans Wake),
Huxley (Point Counter-Point), Borges (Fictions), Orwell (1984), to a
super-formalization of the mechanism of writing.’Edward W. Said
1990: ‘The Fictions of Criticism’in Richard Macksey (ed.) 1974, p. 57.
668
Borges at Eighty, 1982, p. 98.
669
Critical fascination with the external appearance of writing, its
material effects, continues unabated. ‘From Omar Khayyám’s moving
finger to Rousseau’s trembling hand, from the broken tables of Modes
to the purloined letters of Poe and Alice Walker, from Borges’
encyclopedia to Wordsworth’s lines left upon a seat in a yew tree,
images of writing in writing testify to an enduring fascination with the
mechanics and materiality of the written word.’But Borges never
mistakes this very materiality for the phenomenon of writing. Barbara
Johnson 1990: ‘Writing’in Frank Lentricchia and McLaughlin Thomas
(eds) 1990: Critical Terms for Literary Study, p. 39.
670
As Henry Sayre comments on Richard Poirier’s The Performing
Self, the referentiality crisis in modern art, the drive to produce unique
art works leads a preoccupation with visual effects rather than
investigations of the image through the virtuosity of its representation.
He sees a parallel in literature, where the recapitulation of the forms of
writing, its repertoire of technical effects, becomes an end in itself:
‘...Poirier discovered the same sorts of tendencies at work in the fiction
of such writers as Borges, John Barth, and Iris Murdoch, all of whom
420
sentence, after we have read it, is its product. To agree with Hirsch
implies that all we do when reading is process information. This is
never simply the case however, since reading requires an active
process of interpretation: words only make sense in relation to other
words, both in the string of a sentence, and also in the strings of
significance that we bring to bind the text to our view of the world.
Significance, as narrowly defined by Hirsch, obeys the same rule of
unruly connotative behaviour: the author’s view of the significance of
the text varies as the result of any number of factors, including
domestic trauma, ever-changing perceptions of self-worth,
susceptibilities to bi-polar affective disorders. In the exegesis which
follows I have not tried to take an authoritative view of the problem, but
simply to chart some interesting points of reference from which to view
the bare possibility of some principle of operation other than intention
in Borges’early narratives. See E. D. Hirsch Jr. 1976a: ‘In Defense of
the Author’, p. 91.
675
See Bruce F. Kawin 1989: Telling it Again and Again: Repetition in
Literature and Film pp. 135, 168.
676
Naomi Lindstrom, 1990, Jorge Luis Borges: A Study of the Short
Fiction, p. 7.
677
Borges, ‘Prólogo’to Fervor de Buenos Aires, 1974, p. 13.
678
Borges, Evaristo Carriego, 1974, p. 113. In this theory of succession
one may discern the hand of Jamesian psychology: ‘A succession of
feelings, in and of itself, is not a feeling of succession. And since, to
our successive feelings, a feeling of their succession is added, that
must be treated as an additional fact requiring its own special
elucidation...’in William James 1910: Psychology, p. 285.
679
Borges The Aleph and Other Stories, pp. 238-9. Actually the real
beginning of his narrative production may be traced to a reminiscence
in his 1925 collection Inquisiciones, ‘La traducción de un incidente’(pp.
17-21) where the early days of the Spanish Ultraist movement are
described as an intellectual and artistic duel between Ramon Gómez
de la Serna and Rafael Cansinos Asséns. The ‘translation’has the
classic Borgesian structure in embryo - two protagonists locked in an
eternal struggle, each of whom is necessary for the other’s survival,
playing out their timeless battle as universal emblems. Voici the
penultimate paragraph: ‘We will not speak of cultures that fall into
disuse. Life’s constancy, its harsh continuity, is a certainty of art.
However much appearances may fall and change themselves like the
422
moon, a certain poetical essence will always remain. Poetic reality can
contain a whole verse of Vergil in a few lines of common poetry. And it
can be contained in the same dialectical way, in the harsh tumult of a
gaol’s uncertain languages.’(p. 20) My adapted translation. For other
experiments in narration see certain chapters in Evaristo Carriego,
especially ‘Las inscripciones de los carros’and ‘Historias de jinetes’
where the critical essay is framed within a narrative structure. See
‘Chapter 7: Las inscripciones de los carros’, 1974, pp. 148-151;
‘Chapter 8: Historias de jinetes’pp. 152-155, and ‘Chapter 11: Historia
del tango’pp. 159-168. For a reasonably exhaustive summary of
Borges’principal stylistic features, see Jaime Alazraki 1988: Borges
and the Kabbalah, pp. 93-94.
680
Borges The Aleph and Other Stories, pp. 238-9.
681
Ibid, p. 282.
682
Loc. cit, p. 282.
683
Crítica, September 16, 1933.
684
Borges The Aleph and Other Stories, p. 231. See ‘Sir Thomas
Browne’in Inquisiciones, pp. 33-41. Daniel O’Hara notes in his reading
of Harold Bloom’s own redemptive project that revisionism is always
paid for by a suppression of the anxiety of influence: One must simply
hold the past back with one hand, while drawing it forward with the
other! See Daniel O’Hara 1983: The Genius of Irony: Nietzsche in
Bloom. In Jonathan Arac; Wlad Godzich; Wallace Martin (eds) 1983:
The Yale Critics: Deconstruction in America, p. 120.
685
As Borges remarks of Paul Groussac, ‘No hay muerte de escritor
sin el inmediato planteo de un problema ficticio, que reside en indagar
- o profetizar - qué parte quedará de su obra. Ese problema es
generoso, ya que postula la existencia posible de hechos intelectuales
eternos, fuera de la persona o circunstancias que los produjeron; pero
también es ruin, porque parece husmear corrupciones.’(There is
always the postulation of a fictitious problem at the death of an author.
It consists in determining, or prophesying, what part of his work shall
be left to remain. This problem is generous, because it already posits
the possible existence of eternal intellectual facts beyond the
personality or circumstances that produced them. But it ruinous as
well, since it tends to go looking for corruptions.) ‘Paul Groussac’in
Discusión, 1974, p. 234. Concerning contemporary reception of the
early essay material, the comments of Luis Harss and Barbara
Dohman are as conventional as they are common: ‘El tamaño de mi
423
Endnotes to Conclusion
711 As for the position of the narratee one may take a leaf out of
“Pierre Menard” and become the product of our own re-narration as
Genette points out. See Gérard Genette 1980: Narrative Discourse, p.
262.
712
Borges ‘Ultraísmo’Nosotros, Vol. XV, No. 151, p. 468. My
translation. As Alan Singer points out in a short exegesis on ‘Pierre
Menard: Author of the Quixote’these disjunctions can have the side-
effect of troping the recapitulatory trope into a spiral of endless
recurrence subsumed under the sign of the reader’s cultural
narcissism. Alan Singer 1983: A Metaphorics of Fiction: Discontinuity
and Discourse in the Modern Novel, pp. 17-22
713
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels complain that there is, in
practice, no difference between having a theory and practising it, since
to think in terms of theory is to imply its practice as a guide for
interpretation. Can Borges then be considered a “practician” within his
project, or a “theorist” when he’s outside it? On Knapp and Michaels’
reading of the distinction he cannot be considered exclusively either.
See Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels 1985b: A Reply to Rorty:
What is Pragmatism?, pp. 139-146.
427